Paper Locks
by AmandaFriend
Summary: Post season 7 & 8 finales exploring how Booth regains his family and squashes a pesky Pelant. Lots o' characters working toward the truth.
1. Phase 1

**Paper Locks**

**A/N: Yeah, yeah. . . I know. Poor Booth, Bad-**_**Bad**_** Pelant and Way-to-go Max. Story #2,447,778 on the finale. But wait. . . .**

**SPOILER ALERT! I have a few theories. (I didn't get anything right, did I, on Candle in the Storm? So what makes anyone think I could be close now?) **

**But, really. . . how could I know ANyTHINg about the coming season except that, barring those pesky Mayans and their calendar, it's coming. (Maybe Pelant and the Mayans get together. . . naahhw!)**

**I don't own Bones, but I sure would like to buy a piece of it, if only to get a sneak peek.**

Long after she signs off on a case, some images linger. Usually it's only a face, a look captured in a photograph that offers up some sense of the personality lost. Sometimes it's the image of the horror the victim faced while still alive.

Sometimes it's the most immediate horror that refuses to disappear and almost becomes part of her DNA, like the body of a young man lying apart from an island of broken glass within a sea of red on the forensics platform at the lab. Or a young man who goes off to war and comes back changed so much that he joins forces with a cannibal serial killer.

Most images aren't that horrific, but they're always about the victim, a life lost, a brief memory as some small tribute.

Over the years, she'd been able to let go of those images, to allow them only a temporary stay in her mind's eye before releasing them, like leaves in the wind, to scatter before the next whirlwind brings in another victim.

But this particular image she cannot let go. It haunts her days when she sees the emptiness in the office and the lab, and it haunts her nights as she lays in bed wondering.

The woman stands at the head of the table, her hands gently picking up each bone with a kind of reverence one only sees in church. Each bone has already been carefully examined—X-rayed and photographed and scanned. But that kind of examination is nothing next to this examination. Each bone deserves to be studied, and she does, with critical looks and a sure hand. And each bone is remembered.

While she is good at her job—_a federal coroner has to be_—she became better in the presence of the very deliberate, the very objective, the very exacting forensic anthropologist she inherited when she took on the job as head of forensics at the Jeffersonian.

That woman is part of her DNA now.

She imagines there have been changes in the woman's appearance to disguise the best selling novelist. Perhaps changes in her voice and mannerisms as well. But she hopes that someday she'll see her again and that wish is something that will not change.

The weeks certainly will have altered the baby. She knows that babies grow and change almost daily and this flight will most certainly have changed both the woman and the child in the same way that her absence has changed what is happening around her now.

"We've got a white female, mid-30s, dead from what? Gunshot probably. You got height? Weight?"

Dr. Clark Edison sat back on his heels and looked over the body with a practiced eye. "Between 5'7" and 5'9". Weight, about 130 to 140."

She's waiting for her return, but this is not the way she expects it to go and she draws attention to the lower portion of the skeleton. "Has she ever given birth?"

Agent Flynn, who has been conducting the investigations with the Jeffersonian for some time now, is certainly not aware of the significance of her question. But Clark is.

There's an almost imperceptible shake of his head. "No, there's no indication that our victim gave birth. No. It's not. . . ."

He leaves his statement hanging, but that's how it's been of late. Everything is hanging, waiting expectedly for something to happen to change the way things are. Everything seems to be on pause despite the fact that everything seems to be moving forward.

"Great. That narrows things down a bit." Agent Flynn gives no indication that he is aware of the silent communication that goes on between herself and Dr. Edison, but that's understandable. They don't really talk about her, but when they do, it is done with more silences than words.

"If there's nothing else you can tell me, I'll make arrangements for the body to be transported back to the Jeffersonian. ID this afternoon?"

She watches as he nods—his version of goodbye—and then heads off toward an area spotted by the dark jackets of the FBI techs.

"He's not as, what's the word, _lively_ as Agent Booth, is he?"

Clark's assessment, made when Flynn is safely away, hangs in the air between them for a moment before she can offer up an answer. "No. No, he's not." _He's not Seeley._

But nothing is as it seems. There are adjustments. Just having Dr. Edison on the scene of a crime like this is just one of the many things that are different these days.

"You know, Nora thinks there's a certain corporate mentality to working at the FBI. You've seen one FBI agent, you've seen them all. They dress alike, sound alike. Cookie cutter professionals. But as I was telling her just the other day. . . ."

She listens as he expounds on his theory and while she is adaptable, she misses being on the sidelines of a different couple's life. Clark and Nora seem entirely too. . . too normal.

oOo

She runs the vital statistics into the missing person's database and waits as the computer runs through the possibilities.

If she didn't have any work here, she would have told Hodgins long ago that all she just wanted was to pack up and leave for Paris and paint and make love and raise Michael. But running information through databases and creating visual scenarios for murders and cross-referencing murder weapons isn't really work these days.

Trying to crack an impossible code is.

Once she has a name for the latest victim, she returns to the code that has frustrated her for weeks. The FBI has taken it to experts in artificial intelligence and braniac mathematicians, but everyone is stumped.

And her million dollars worth of computer equipment is just as stymied.

"Ange?"

When she turns from staring at the face of a young woman who smiles despite her horrific demise, she sees the look of concern that seems permanently etched on her husband's face.

"I was thinking it might be nice to go to the zoo tomorrow with Michael."

"What?"

"The zoo." Jack smiles and steps closer. "You know, the place with all those animals."

"I know what the zoo is." She sighs and lets him close the distance even further and wrap her in his arms. "I think I've been there before."

"I've okayed it with Cam. Just a couple of hours, okay?"

It's in the middle of a murder investigation and except for nursing breaks or doctor visits, she—_no, they_—never take time off like this.

"You know, a trip to Paris would be better."

"If we went to Paris, Ange, we'd never come back."

He's still holding her close, so she cannot see his expression, but she knows that tone.

He's serious.

oOo

She's heard them all.

The whispers in the hallways seem to be louder these days, bolder, as if people don't care if she hears.

But that's how it is when you've got one foot out the door—people figure you've grown deaf as well.

She's still under a cloud of scandal, just off a performance review and an intensive check into her finances and she should know by now if she can afford early retirement.

Because surviving this is just pure hell.

She came clean, told her superiors everything: transposed numbers on the search warrant to give the squints time to clear Dr. Brennan, visited Brennan's house to warn her about the arrest warrant, offered up advice that the good doctor turn herself in.

Was it her fault the woman transferred $150,000 into her account and then rabbited?

Booth backed her story, but do they really care to believe a man who's standing under his own cloud?

The bar association has her case under review and she's seriously considering finding a job at that big, multi-partnered law firm over the border in Virginia and becoming lost as one of a billion law clerks employed there if and when the bar yanks her license.

"Miss Julian?"

She's been a federal prosecutor for years and she knows that tone.

Turning from the pile of file folders on her desk, she notes that sweet little thing who's been circling her office like a ravenous vulture just waiting to pounce. She's carrying a file folder from the Jeffersonian and opening it as she's approaching, sure she's going to get an answer without even asking permission to talk to her.

Yeah, that Aamer to Zurkowski law firm's looking good these days.

"How much is it going to hurt our case that this Dr. Brennan is now a fugitive with an arrest warrant out on her?"

"Are you asking if the fact that she went on her murderous spree before Dr. Sawyer's murder is going to sway the jury?"

She's losing her touch. The sarcasm was practically dripping and this Harvard-educated lawyer, Grace Something-or-other, isn't folding like a cheap cot.

"Dr. Clark Edison did his own examination of the remains?"

"Yes."

"Then what's the problem?"

Grace Something-or-other stands there on the other side of her desk and has the audacity to look worried. "From all of the notes and the reports, Dr. Brennan was all over this case. She initially identified the. . . ."

She's read the case files and she knows. Hell, she's got it practically memorized. She was all set to prosecute this case when it was pulled from her like the other two dozen cases she was working. That was before.

This is the after.

"Dr. Saroyan and Dr. Edison will back up the evidence. Dr. Brennan's present troubles aren't going to do much except muddy the waters a bit. Put those two up on the stand and they'll calm the waters."

"This is no longer a slam dunk. The Jeffersonian's reputation is a bit tarnished these days."

_IF_ she were a violent woman, she just might slap the impudence from the face of this Grace come-lately who is taking her hard work and efforts and shoving her own tarnished reputation in her face.

"You just never mind what the defense says about Dr. Brennan. You just go in there, head high and you tell them that that sorry son of a bitch killed that young woman and you show them the pictures and not one, I tell you, not one of those jurors won't be but teary-eyed."

She's come from behind her desk and is slowly walking the young lawyer from her room, step by agonizing step backwards and she doesn't care if her impassioned speech earns her a mention that evening at the local watering hold.

"Those squints are the best and they're the reason why you're going in there with the kind of evidence you've got."

She sees it, finally; a hint of respect and fear and she's about ready to go in for the kill when a fresh-faced clerk stands at her doorway and looks about ready to swallow his tongue.

"What do you want?"

"Uhh, Miss Julian?" Even his freckles are quaking at her tone. "The chief federal prosecutor wants to see you in your office. As soon as possible."

The message is delivered with a tremulous voice and she realizes she's trying to slay the wrong dragon.

"I'll be right up, cherie." Grace Harvard-educated-interloper stands to the side, still in awe at the magnificence she can still muster when she needs to. "And you? Don't underestimate the Jeffersonian's squint squad. They were trained by the finest forensic anthropologist in the world."

But Grace just isn't living up to her name; there's shark in her DNA. "They seem to be breeding a better kind of sociopath over there. First that young forensic anthropologist who joins up with a cannibal and their star forensic anthropologist who kills a nut job after she releases him from the loony bin?" The young woman is eye-to-eye with her and not backing down either. Self-righteousness has put a bit of starch in her backbone. "Seems to me that there's a high probability of becoming a murderer if you're into forensic anthropology at the Jeffersonian."

But she likes getting the last word, and today, when her own career is careening out of control thanks to a hacktivist-turned-serial killer and a certain forensic anthropologist and her criminal father, she would get in the last words.

"Cher, let me tell you this. If Dr. Brennan killed that poor man, I can assure you there wouldn't be any body left to find."

oOo

He's been awash in a sea of reports for some time when he finally looks up.

"Hey."

He's not used to visits from profilers these days unless he counts the psychologist who questioned him after Brennan's disappearance and drops by occasionally to seek additional insights. "What are you doing here, Sweets?"

"I'm kind of at loose ends tonight." Sweets's voice has that soft edge that only serves to remind him of why he's riding his desk instead of riding around in his official, government-issued SUV. He's got enough guilt and sadness, thank you very much.

"Daisy's working on a paper for class. I was wondering if I could interest you in dinner. My treat."

There's been quite a bit of that lately: the sympathy dinner.

"I don't know, Sweets. There's that game tonight."

With 200+ channels, there's got to be a game somewhere tonight. Tiddlewinks, for God's sake, dominoes, checkers—anything might be preferable to dinner and sympathy.

"A quick sandwich. A chance to catch up."

The soft edge has decidedly become sharper, and he can tell the emotion behind it.

"Yeah, sure." He's got to eat, doesn't he? And eating alone is almost as bad as dinner with a side of sympathy. "Name the place and time."

And he doesn't realize it, but that's when the next chapter of this mess that is his life begins.


	2. Phase 2

**Chapter 2: Paper Locks**

He's been through it a hundred million times in his head.

"_I love you Booth. I don't want you to think that Christine is the only reason we're together."_

She could still surprise him. One minute she was reassuring him, next minute she was driving off with his child and his heart: the joy of his daughter's baptism, then drowned in the undertow.

All right, nothing was that simple. He picked himself up and walked part of the way home—if only to give himself time to think. _(And give them time to get away.) _Then he doubled back and called for a tow truck.

_Evidence_, he had thought to himself at the time. _It's all about the evidence_.

And it was. At home, Flynn was waiting with warrants—one to arrest, the other to search.

They got their search.

They also got their prime suspect on news channels that evening and the story went viral on the Internet. Flynn was counting down the hours before they'd catch a best selling author with child in tow who had made headlines recently with a little thing like a murder mystery on the set of her own movie murder mystery.

Then Flynn started counting days.

Then weeks.

You had to hand it to the old con man—Max had made his family disappear. GPS, cell phones, traffic cameras, satellite imagery—hell, there were dozens of ways to be plugged into the system and Max had unplugged them all. They traced the cell phone to Florida. One credit card made it all the way to Oregon. Another stayed local—Maryland.

And that was that.

Silence.

It was the same kind of silence that greeted him every night in their Mighty Hut. It was the same kind of silence he got from the squints when he asked if they'd made any more progress on the case.

Silence.

A man could get lost in a silence that great.

But, he'd always remind himself of the facts in the case.

One, she left like she did because she needed someone to stay behind and find answers. She trusted he would do that and the only way he could do that was by staying plugged into the system.

Two, she loved him. She loved their kid. Love was going to have to hold them together even though everything seemed to have fallen apart. That might not make sense, completely, but love didn't make sense and while love seemed a bit thin these days, it would have to do.

Three, Pelant was the villain in this piece, not Brennan. He was the reason he was sleeping alone in a great big house. Alone. He was the reason three people were dead. Him alone. He was the reason his family was gone.

Four. Catch the murderer, get family back.

Five.

Five.

He wasn't sure what five was exactly, but he knew he wanted a five and a six and a seven with Brennan. It hurt that she ran, but he knew her well enough to know just how much of a toll it had to be taking on her. She'd protected him in running like she did, and she had trusted him to understand. But she knew what it was like to be left behind and she knew how much he loved his kids. She knew.

Five.

Five. Nothing is as it seems.

oOo

"Okay, Sweets, spill it."

The young psychologist insisted they try a different restaurant than the usual and he'd driven the extra miles only to have the same kind of meal he would have gotten at the diner for a few dollars more at this new place. He wasn't sure softer lighting or padding on the seats was worth the inflated price but he was willing to play along if only because he really wanted the company.

And he was damned sure Sweets hadn't dragged him away from a promising night on the couch watching some game until he fell asleep just to rehash the testimony he'd given in court that day on the Summers case. But dinner hadn't strayed from the mundane and by the time they'd finished dinner, he was itching to know.

"This isn't just a friendly dinner, Sweets. I might not be in the field agent right now, but I do see the signs."

Sweets sat back, wiping his mouth with his napkin. Knowing Sweets, he expected a suggestion that he enter into therapy for a month or two, talk out his feelings, get over his anger in this case before it festered, try to put himself in Brennan's. . . .

"What if, Booth, we're working this from the wrong premise?"

It really wasn't what he had been expecting. "What? Working what?" He leaned forward. "I'm a hundred million miles from the Pelant case, if you haven't noticed. My partner took off rather than face a murder charge and I'm not allowed near the case."

"Pelant wanted to destroy the Jeffersonian and the partnership between the lab and the FBI, Booth. He almost succeeded."

"Because we all did what he expected us to do." He leaned back and tossed his napkin at the table. It landed in the middle of the plate. "He won that round, Sweets."

"He expected the lab to cover up for Dr. Brennan. He could then expose that and discredit the lab." Sweets was warming to his explanation. "And you know why that failed?"

"Because Cam did the right thing?"

"Dr. Saroyan did what Dr. Brennan would have done in the same circumstances." Sweets leaned in. "All along, Pelant's mission has been to expose corruption in federal institutions. He wanted to show how the lab was corrupt, but Dr. Saroyan didn't do what he expected. She couldn't ignore the evidence. But make no mistake, he wanted to destroy the lab beginning with Dr. Brennan."

"I get that, Sweets."

"He saw Dr. Brennan as a threat."

"I get it."

His voice has taken on his smarty pants tone. "By running, Dr. Brennan didn't fit into what Pelant expected. He figured she would trust the system to free her, but she didn't. It gives us an advantage."

The only advantage he had seen in her running was that Christine might get to see the country. No. No. If Pelant could make a corpse disappear and get into secure government buildings with a dripping body then he could have had Bones transferred to a prison cell with one of the people they'd put away. Or worse.

"What's the advantage?"

"We've got Dr. Brennan."

oOo

She'd done the right thing.

It was a point of pride with her—she could do the right thing professionally. She could do that. Even when it felt so wrong.

"Enjoy the zoo," she called after Angela and Hodgins as they headed toward the day care. She kept watching long after they'd turned the corner and disappeared out the doors of the lab.

Part of her wanted to call them back, ask if they were planning on doing more than just taking off early for a stroll through the zoo, but she held her tongue.

Sometimes you just have to do that as a boss.

Angela had provided a positive ID, looked at the bullet evidence, created a probable scenario. Check.

Hodgins had provided time of death, a complete analysis of particulates found on the clothes and the one shoe recovered at the scene, a thorough catalog of the soil samples found at the scene. Check.

Dr. Clark Edison was orchestrating a thorough examination of the bones with Finn Abernathy. Check.

She'd run the tox screen, did the partial autopsy with what organs remained. Check.

Usually at this time, she retreated to her lab, not really wanting to walk in on Angela or Hodgins. Not because of _that_.

Because of _that_. Both of them would pull out the old case, look at the evidence again, try to piece together a different scenario to the Sawyer murder.

Angela was the worst of the two. Obsessed. Frustrated. Worried.

Angry.

Hodgins seemed to give the information a cursory look before turning to one of his other projects. His worry was about his obsession, Angela, or was it the other way around?

The Sawyer case and its aftermath was the elephant in the room, the great big failure of the Jeffersonian to find the truth to save one of their own. You didn't have to go to the zoo to see that creature because it was there all the time, rearing its head in triumph.

She'd done the right thing, and it had turned out all wrong. Pelant had left behind code in some of the books—code that seemed to touch off another program—like the GPS with a mind of its own pointing the hikers' way to the body. Any and all of it could be traced back to Pelant, but it could also be traced back to the 57 other library patrons who checked out the same book.

They'd run out of answers.

oOo

"You're saying Bones was right to go to Sawyer?"

He had to give the kid credit, he hadn't stopped working the case. Sweets was trying to make sense of something that had been troubling him since the case broke. "In her mind, it was the rational thing to do. She knew him before the paranoia and the schizophrenia took over. She probably thought she could determine what was mental illness and what was rational thought."

He studied Sweets. They'd retreated to a walking path along the river after dinner and the overhead lights were just beginning to take over for the setting sun. He had expected dinner and a rerun of the tragedies of his life probably a little therapy on the side, but Sweets had refused to go there, thank God.

"Bones likes to know everything. . . ."

"And Sawyer could give her insights into Pelant." Sweets paused. "I've seen the therapy sessions. Sawyer's therapy sessions. I even got two FBI psychologists to take a look at them independently and they come to the same conclusion I have."

He was confused. "What? That Sawyer wasn't nuts?"

"No," Sweets said, his voice low and almost soothing. "That the demon Sawyer was raging about wasn't Christine. It was Christopher Pelant."

oOo

She stared at the paper but no amount of staring changed any of the words there.

The words spoke volumes: Indefinite suspension.

She'd fought the good fight, filed appeal after appeal, tried to argue her case, but in the end, a federal prosecutor who "took a bribe" and put personal feelings . . .

"Ah, hell," she grumbled as she headed toward her car, the paper crumpling in her hand. "Maybe one of those big box firms is hiring."

oOo

"So he wasn't threatening the baby?"

"No," Sweets said. "The psychologists both agree that it's entirely possible that Sawyer mixed up the names. All of his comments about the demon are gender indeterminant. . . ."

"Gender what?"

"He uses 'it' to describe the demon except in one session he begins to use 'he'."

He stopped walking and pulled at Sweets' sleeve. "All this hinges on a pronoun?"

"Pelant framed Dr. Brennan for Ethan Sawyer's murder. All of it is circumstantial except for the hair found in her car." Sweets look was intense. "But take everything together and it builds a pretty powerful case against Dr. Brennan. She's hard on nannies and got Christine kicked out of day care, so, overly protective. She's killed before to protect you. She had access to a plant that can be made into a paralytic agent. It's those little things we build up that make the case."

"A good lawyer could have explained away a lot of it—even the hair. It was stuck in the book that Sawyer gave to Dr. Brennan. It was transferred to her clothing when she hugged the man."

"I know all this, Sweets."

"But Dr. Brennan ran because it wasn't what Pelant thought she would do. He expected her to be in the system where he could have her transferred and moved around so much that you would need a map to figure out where she was. Or worse, he could have her committed or drugged or half a dozen other things that would have meant she would be lost to you and Christine and to the investigation."

He nodded. The thought of her lost that way—in a system they both believed in—had left him sleepless with fear. But with her gone, God knows where, that left him with more than worry, more than fear. It was an ache he couldn't shake.

"How does this help us, Sweets?"

"Outside of the system, she's a wild card. Even if we don't know where she is, we might be able to use that to trigger a reaction in Pelant. He's scared that the Jeffersonian might be his match, especially with Dr. Brennan."

"He's holding the cards, Sweets." He closed his eyes, but the images of a woman and a child came to mind much too quickly. "We don't know where they are."

"Maybe." Sweets grew quiet and the night seemed to come alive for a moment. "But if we take the information from the other psychologists, we might help motivate Agent Flynn to look at bit harder in Pelant's direction."

oOo

Years ago she remembered being perched on a camp stool in front of an easel trying to capture the essence of a chimpanzee swinging back and forth from one branch to another in front of a huge Plexiglass window.

She had succeeded in sketching the primate in mid-flight, one paw reaching out while another let go, a moment frozen in graphite, but discarded because she never quite got it right.

And as she watched her husband and son watching the orangutans cavorting among the branches, Jack grinning wildly as he helped Michael follow the progress of one young ape practically flying through the air, she realized what had been missing that day she'd tried to sketch the chimpanzee.

The bright, crystalline laughter of a child.

Michael clapped and laughed and watched with bright eyes as the ape—probably a tad bigger than her son—traveled from one end of the enclosure to the other along the trail of branches, swinging with a graceful ease that delighted him.

"Look, Michael." Jack was practically as bright-eyed as their son, pointing out the movements of a large orangutan scratching himself before climbing upward to join the younger ape in the treetops.

It was easy to forget watching Jack and Michael; their joy was contagious.

"Ma-kee, ma-kee," Michael said pointing.

"It's an orangutan, Michael. _Pongo pygmaeus."_

Angela laughed. "You really expect him to remember the scientific name?"

"Hey," Jack said, "it's never too early to start."

"My granddaughter loves monkeys," came a voice from behind them. "Although she seems more partial to rabbits. Pink ones, if you can believe that."

Angela turned toward the familiar voice and found herself in shock staring into the face of Max Keenan.

**Author's Note: Having fun, yet? The joy of fan fiction is to practice one's craft and play with characters that someone else created. The joy of publishing stories here is to get feedback in terms of traffic, alerts and reviews. For every 100 hits, some writers are lucky to get one review. A suggestion, dear reader: take time to read this summer. While I could recommend a few good stories here, I would recommend that you just find something you like, book or magazine or what have you, and read. Think of it as exercise for the brain. **

'**Til next installment. **


	3. Phase 3

**Phase 3: Paper Locks**

_Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move. -Sun Tzu_

Where does Joy reside within her?

She has no memories of being Joy, no conscious connection to that name or to that person. She has always been Temperance, or Tempe. (Only later would she be Tempe-rary at a foster home or Temper at college.) Even later, she was Brennan or Bren or Sweetie or Dr. Temperance Brennan or Dr. B.

And then there is Bones.

But where is Joy?

Her father insisted that the baby is her spitting image at this age, but without proof, how can that be? She has no memories of her early childhood, no photographs, only vague flashes of images that may or may not have been that life.

Because her life has not always been hers and now she has lost even that.

She knows that makes little sense, a foolish bit of poetic fluff, cobbled together from bits of this memory and fragments of emotions and whirled together in the great neuron storms within her mind. One's life is one's life, whatever they choose to make of it and she has worked hard and long to craft together this life. (No, _that_ life.) She has a romantic partner who is also her work partner and the father of her child and the co-owner of a house and. . . . She has a career and a reputation and a movie in production and another book on the way and. . . . She has friends and family and a life that extends beyond and. . . .

No. All she really has right now are the shards of that life scattered around her by the whims of one Christopher Pelant.

She stands outside his home watching the dance of shadows within and wonders what tricks of light will become part of his next magic act. The night remains cool and wraps itself around her like a shroud and in some ways she feels the madman behind the curtain taunts her still. Her life: the accomplishments, the friends, the family—_her family_—have been ripped away.

Thrusting her hands deeper in the pockets of her coat, she turns away from Pelant's lair. The electronic tether on Pelant's ankle mocked her as he seemed to move freely around the city, leaving behind bodies and codes, twisting truth to reveal only lies that bind better than his monitor. And without his monitor, his freedom means nothing is safe anymore. Around her are scattered small markers, her tokens to gauge his movements, to understand when he's left his home to venture forth to practice his next act. She's already become his unwitting assistant once and she refuses to do so again. While it might be more effective to leave behind lots of surveillance equipment (she once could afford to train a hundred or more cameras on his place), but until she can see past the slick presentation she has little doubt he can put any image he wants to on her cameras like a magician's sleight of hand trick.

No. He's already duped others in his audience. He altered the surveillance tape and implicated her in a murder. He called Booth using her voice and brought on a storm that derailed Booth's career and their investigation. No. She trusts her eyes and her other senses more than machines that can be manipulated to create any trick Pelant wants.

She trusts that truth will win out, but time fights her. Time and manipulated evidence and an evil genius and the uncertainty of knowing what his endgame is.

(_No, a voice reminds her. You know what his endgame is_.)

Walking back to the car, she has plenty of time to run through the things she's yet to do. The next move should be hers. (_You've lost so much._)

The key slides into the lock easily and she looks around to make sure the cover of darkness still conceals her. She quickly folds herself into the car and wraps the seat belt around her before turning the ignition.

This is different and familiar, something she's done thousands of times, yet nothing is as it seems.

Not even her.

A glance takes in her surroundings, a neighborhood of similar boxes like Pelant's which is several blocks away, and she spots the lit window framing the movement within one of them. A man, a woman and, she can only imagine what with the small bicycle thrown carelessly on the lawn, that they have a child between them and she's struck by the unwelcome feeling that she's lived this life before, always standing outside staring at something she would like to have (_you once had_) and the feeling pounds at her skull and clenches at her chest and she puts the car into gear to escape.

(_But can you escape the memories?_)

Past becomes present and she wonders how it is that she is the one who has left the others behind (_or has she been left behind?_) She wonders how night, which for centuries had been considered a miasma of evil now acts as a cover for her activities which are all for good.

She wonders about her partner and her friends still visible as Pelant's targets.

And she wonders about joy. . . .

She wonders. . . .

oOo

The shadows outside the house grow long, but he has eyes only for time, not space.

And he wonders. . . .

Angela's printed all the photos from his phone, enlarged those from the camera he brought especially for the baby, but they cannot take the place of _them_. Somewhere in the shadows he imagines them _(because that is all he has right now)_, safe and hidden away neatly like Christmas presents waiting to be opened.

Safe.

That is the prayer he makes daily _(a wish and a prayer),_ that they are both well away from Pelant's reach. He's no longer a threat to the technology wizard, no longer anything but a desk jockey tethered to his own kind of monitoring device. He's a whisper away from going crazy (_he's a man of action, dammit_), a whisper away from placing a bet _("God grant me the serenity to accept. . .")_ but he'd ride the desk forever, hit every meeting if it meant they were safe.

Once their mighty hut rang with a kind of joy that he had never quite imagined could be his. And now? He shuts the glass doors and locks them before looking out toward the woods again and wondering where they are. (_Where is joy?)_

Above the fireplace, the television is alive with some muted game, but he's more interested in deciphering the index cards he's lined up on the kitchen table. No matter how he shuffles them, no matter how they're arranged, they hold onto their secrets like a magician's assistant.

She'd gone off before _(to Malapookoo)_ and she hadn't called or written and he'd felt abandoned and he can't speak her name _(their names)_ for fear that he'll break and he wonders. . . .

With one sweep of his hand, he scatters the index cards, his frustration almost as great as his fear. And he wonders _(where joy has gone.)_

oOo

He's been down this road before _(Christine and him)_ and a glance at the car seat behind him tells him all is well.

This is not a flight from the crew of thieves or a means to draw off danger. No. He's still in full protective mode, a pure bundle of joy in the backseat, his job to make sure that no harm can find her.

Each glance brings back memories of his Temperance _(his joy)_ before they'd caught sight of McVickers and had to draw him away from the children. Is this his Christine as a baby, or is it his Temperance _(his joy)_ stretching and yawning then easing back into a smile-soaked sleep?

He's become the ultimate babysitter, his only charge—_keep her safe_.

Had he brought the children with them before, he would have made it into a game—hide and seek. _(But it's hard to hide a 15-year-old genius and a 19-year-old still finding himself.) _Now he's playing that game with his adult daughter and her infant daughter and a madman he'd rather make dead.

The evidence to pinning the murders to the bastard lies in keeping him alive. The evidence for exonerating his daughter lies with keeping the murdering bastard alive and so he waits.

And wonders. . . .

He's seen the damage he's done to Temperance up close these days, the fear that still gripped her _(grips her)_ at the thought of him disappearing_. _Does Booth understand how much she wants to return, how deep the wound is of having left him behind?

Past has become the present and he truly understands the forces pulling her apart. He'd lost her once and every day he sees his own little girl _(his joy)_ slipping away and the hardened truth of Temperance taking her place.

And he wonders. . . .

oOo

The curls of the wig soften the deeper angles of her face and the bangs—well, they are a throwback to her time in Maluku and somehow they bother her more than the warmth and itchiness under the skullcap. The darker makeup and dark contacts give her a slightly more exotic look, especially with her high cheekbones.

She's donned several layers—partly to disguise her leaking breasts, partly to peel off in case she needs to alter her appearance. The layers give her a more matronly appearance, makes her feel as if she hasn't entirely shed the baby weight even though she's done that and more.

A changed gait, a slight Southern accent—she's tucked away Temperance Brennan as best she can.

Her ability to compartmentalize, to box up one part of her life and to hide it from the other parts has been seriously compromised over the last year. Booth once said that a baby changes everything and despite his tendency toward hyperbole, she knows he is right.

Hormonal fluctuations play havoc with her still, but she knows that those are only part of what pulls at her. She's become her parents, abandoned one life to live another and the ache that comes with this betrayal of her own family may well pull her apart.

It's not just that she's lost her name; she's done the unthinkable—left the relative safety of the lab and her life to avoid the law she once served. She's no longer Dr. Temperance Brennan (_because to be her is to be a target)_ and she is no longer Sweetie _(you are my metaphorical sister)_ or Bones _(which hurts most of all.) _

It's not just the loss of identity; it is knowing who she has left behind and the kind of pain he must be feeling and knowing that her return with the baby may never be salve enough.

She is caught between heaven _(I cannot believe but I can hope)_ and hell _(abandon all hope)_ in her own kind of limbo _(where bones are nameless.)_

oOo

She wakes to a baby crying and for a single moment she is back in her own bed, in her own home, just a few feet away from her daughter,u sleeping next to Booth. But the truth is she is in the law library at Georgetown University, sifting through the transcripts of Christopher Pelant's trials.

Or, she was. She lifts her head and looks around at the heads bent over laptops and weighty tomes. This is the concept of "burning the candle at both ends" that Booth had warned her of, but she sees it as a necessary evil. No one seems interested in her, or even in the noisy infant, but more intent on their studies.

She rechecks her notes and re-reads part of the transcripts in front of her. Reading through the contents provides her with the details of the proceedings, but gives her little insight into the man. She needs Booth for that. Or even Sweets.

But Booth is no longer in the field. She is no longer part of the team at the Medico-Legal Lab of the Jeffersonian working with the FBI.

This is no longer her case; she is the case.

Back in Chicago in grad school, Ethan Sawyer had befriended her, talked about mathematics while she discoursed on anthropology and despite their differences, they had both taken comfort being in the company of an intellectual equal.

There's the hint of a guilt in thinking about Ethan, about having given Pelant a target, but she sweeps that thought away for another time.

Yesterday she was at American University, reading copies of some of the books from Ethan's room at the mental hospital. Her father has accused her of trying to do too much, of taking too many risks, of being too close to her home. But she's careful, keeps to herself, tries to blend in. She's been reading her way across the country, stopping at universities along the way, formulating a theory that she hopes has merit.

This is not her strength. She is far better with human anatomy and anthropology and kinesiology; she is not a mathematician, not conversant in Ethan's work in artificial intelligences, but she thinks she might just have the key for the code on his wall. Trying to understand Pelant—she really has few insights into what makes Pelant tick, why he is targeting her team, what he can do to harm them further.

No, that is not entirely true. Her team is a threat to Pelant's greater purpose and she knows that with her out of the picture, it only makes sense his next target should be the FBI agent assigned to the Jeffersonian or Dr. Saroyan if he feels they will get in his way of his master plan.

It also makes sense that she should do as much as she can, unfettered by a jail cell, unburdened right now by the demands of her old life to gain as much knowledge as she can.

Hodgins might be the conspiracy theorist, might be good at puzzles, but even he hasn't cracked the code to Ethan Sawyer's message. _(If he had, wouldn't she be home by now?)_ She hasn't seen it, hasn't found a way to access that information yet, but she's hoping that her father can persuade Hodgins to send her a copy or to test her key against it.

The baby cries again and she looks to see the mother trying to pacify her child. The baby is harnessed to a carrier and seems entirely unimpressed with the vast knowledge contained within the walls of the library.

The cries make her heart ache.

Tired and alone, she has managed to study and to piece together information into a picture that is slowly coming into focus. Pelant has hobbled the team, fractured her partnership with Booth, and damaged her career. Whatever he's done she is sure that she can undo.

She has to.

The baby's cry draws her attention once again and some maternal urge makes her crane her neck to see the tiny creature making such a large noise. The movement pulls at the muscles stiff from her impromptu nap and she tries to stretch away the ache.

She closes the computer file on Pelant's trial and walks slowly toward the front desk. Patience has allowed her to use the terminals using public access or student passwords when they don't log out. She's taken notes on the backs of paper meant to be recycled.

Pelant may not be working alone, of that she has little doubt. She also knows that the computers in and out of the Jeffersonian could very well be compromised or monitored.

Certainly she no longer trusts technology.

For Pelant to engineer the evidence against her, heavy as it is in physiology and conjecture, it has given her some insight into his thinking.

She may not fully understand human behavior—_aren't her studies in anthropology attempts to comprehend what sometimes seems incomprehensible to her_—but she understands logic. And she has insights gleaned from her friend, a man who may now be dead because she wanted a piece of his brilliance to shine a light on the darkness of Pelant.

She stops at the recycling bin by one of the printers and pulls out several sheets of paper. She discards a few with too much writing and begins to fashion a cover page, one she addresses to Dr. Camille Saroyan of the Jeffersonian.

Cam doesn't know it, but she's about to receive a few law journals from Georgetown University through the interlibrary loan system. A few law journals and some notes.

It's easy enough to persuade the bored library clerk to allow her notes to hitch a ride to the Jeffersonian in the pouch with the journals. By tomorrow afternoon when Cam receives them, she'll be somewhere else.

Pelant would have her neutralized in his game of wills, but she's just getting started.

His thinking is measured by a warped desire to exact some kind of perverted justice, to draw attention to his beliefs. While she agrees that military contracts should not go to the best lobbyist or someone's crony, while she acknowledges corruption at te highest levels of government, she also knows that Pelant's actions are only destructive and counterproductive. He targets government corruption but destroys to make his point.

Her thinking is untainted by such corrupt logic.

And besides, she has another advantage over Pelant beyond her superior reasoning , despite the long hours, despite the banishment to limbo, despite her lack of sleep.

She wants her life back.


	4. Phase 4

**Phase 4: Paper Locks**

**A/N: Hope you all enjoyed a lovely Memorial Day weekend and not only did something memorable, but also enjoyed the nice weather (if you had it) and remembered the meaning behind the holiday here in the U.S. **

**Thank you, oh great and powerful readers. Those of you who have been gracious enough to leave a review, thank you. Also, thank you to those who have put this story, or this writer, on alert. **

**And to those of you who have just hung around to read and left nothing behind, there's probably a Christopher Pelant keeping tabs on you. Wouldn't be better to just admit you were here?**

oOoOoOoOoOo

He opened the door to Caroline Julian and blurted out the first question on his mind. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"You have a day off, I have lots of days off, now, do I really need an excuse?"

She breezed past him and headed straight for the kitchen. "Most hosts offer a lady a drink of some kind."

He hurried to keep up with her. "It's 11 in the morning, Caroline. Don't you think that's a bit. . . ."

"Water is fine, Cher. Or coffee would be better." She surveyed the kitchen table, covered with neat stacks of index cards. "You still working the case, Seeley Booth?"

He nodded, "Yeah, but I can't get near the evidence."

"That makes two of us."

Caroline Julian was a force to be reckoned with, usually, but in those 5 words he saw a different side of the federal prosecutor.

"You got to be kidding me."

"No, cher," she said as she headed toward the coffee maker, "I am officially out of a job. The bar association has decided to suspend my license rather than revoke it entirely, but it kind of puts a damper on being a federal prosecutor."

He closed his eyes and exhaled, feeling deflated. "I am so sorry, Caroline."

She waved off his concern as she began opening cupboards. "Where do you keep your coffee? If we're going to look through your index cards and figure out our next move, I need some good, strong coffee."

He crossed to the refrigerator and pulled out the canister of the Kona blend Bones had bought him from the freezer.

"Don't tell me, you get a better brew that way." One eyebrow went north as the line of her mouth went south. "Something that genius partner of yours come up with?"

He ignored her comment. "Sweets had two other FBI profilers take a look at Ethan Sawyer's therapy tapes and they concluded he wasn't talking about our daughter." Leaning against the island, he watched her at work. "Beyond that, there isn't much new that I know of. I'm still on desk duty."

"You have filters for this thing?" She looked at the coffeemaker and began tapping it. "You sure this thing isn't some kind of newfangled rocket ship destined for the moon?"

With a practiced hand, he opened the filter drawer and showed Caroline the new filter there before measuring out the coffee.

This time she was watching him as he began to fill the pitcher with filtered water.

"A little birdie told me that Angela still can't figure out how that videotape was altered." She harrumphed. "That concludes catching up on the evidence." She then slapped him hard on his arm.

"Hey, what the hell? What was that for?" He rubbed his arm which stung horribly from the assault.

"That was for your genius partner talking to that other genius and pissing off a third genius who is now probably conjuring up some other kind of murdering hacking scheme that we can't stop because he's sidelined us with phony charges and whatnot." She drew in a deep breath and he readied himself to be struck again. "What the hell was she doing talking to a paranoid schizophrenic anyway? Doesn't she have enough crazy types in that lab of hers to talk to? Why was she talking to that man anyway? She won't talk to Dr. Sweets, she has to talk to a crazy person about another crazy person?"

He waited, but Caroline simply grimaced and then did something he hadn't expected could follow such a barrage.

"I'm sorry, cherie, but. . . ," and she threw up her hands and silently went to the kitchen table and sat down, speechless.

Booth considered his options. The former prosecutor looked spent, almost defeated. He felt the same thing, almost straight through to his bones. He eyed the coffee and considered the whiskey, but threw away that option as just as useless as reviewing the evidence he'd managed to gather before being removed from the case. Instead, he retreated to the kitchen table and sat down heavily.

"You know what the problem is, cher?"

He rubbed the sore spot on his arm and hesitated before shaking his head.

"Neither one of us has a good idea what's going on inside of the heads of those geniuses."

"What?" The coffeemaker began to hiss and he was seriously considering the whiskey.

"Why was your sweetheart partner there talking to Ethan Sawyer anyway?"

"He was a genius mathematician. . . ."

"I know, I know all that," she interrupted. "They weren't, you know, in the past, I mean. . . ?"

She'd let the question linger in the air. In court, she wouldn't have pulled her punches.

"No, they were just old friends. She thought he could give her some insights into Pelant. All we got was that code on the wall that no one's been able to figure out."

She sighed. He sighed.

They had nothing new.

"Well," said Caroline as she stood and walked over to the coffeemaker, "that was a productive first meeting of the minds."

oOo

"You should have told me, Jack."

She watched as her husband knelt to retrieve the broken remains of the rose he'd been pampering the last few days. She hadn't understood the process, hadn't understood at all how removing the petals from his prized rose was going to create another rose, but she had long ago left botany and bugs to him.

"You really should have told me, Jack. I wouldn't have let Michael near it."

She watched as he almost lovingly cradled the now-destroyed experiment and laid it to rest in the small bucket he kept for his clippings. Michael stood clutching her side, not sure what to make of his father's reaction when he had suddenly spun around and then crashed into one of his father's plants and caught his shirt on a thorn and twisted further to tear off an already ratty looking stem.

"No worries, Babe." He opened up his arms and beckoned Michael to come to him. "It's okay, Buddy. It's just going to take a little longer to create Mom's rose."

"A rose?"

"Yeah." Jack smiled as he hugged Michael. "A miniature rose. A Vision of Angela. Or Angela's Vision."

She sighed and couldn't help but smile. When she first met him, Jack Hodgins was a man hopelessly at war with the world. But somehow she had unlocked the Jack Hodgins who was just hopelessly romantic.

"Well, next time we'll be more careful, right Michael?"

To seal his agreement, Michael placed slobbery lips on his father's cheek and produced something akin to a raspberry.

"All right, Buddy, the rose will grow back. I wasn't really sure I was getting the. . . ."

"And you know, you really should have told me about that other thing, too."

If she hadn't been so shocked, Angela would have hugged her best friend's father, wrestled him to the ground then pummeled him into telling her about Brennan and Christine. As it was, she had said nothing, only stared open-mouthed at the man who nodded and took off with a wave of his hand and was gone almost as quickly as he appeared.

This smile was not the same kind of smile he'd given his son. This one was muted, almost thoughtful.

"Ange, I didn't know if he was going to show."

"You could have warned me. One minute he was there. . . ."

". . . And the next minute he was gone." He straightened up and swung Michael onto his shoulders. "He _is_ a aiding a fugitive." He began his nightly ritual of playing horse—_or Equus ferus_—to Michael's rider.

"So he shows up and that's it? We don't get to ask him questions? We don't even get to know what he wants?"

"Ange. . . ."

"My best friend was framed for murder and she's on the run with her kid and the only person who has any idea of where she is or if she is alive says, 'My granddaughter likes rabbits' and then takes off and you let him?"

"Whoa, there, Buddy." Jack turned from bouncing Michael toward the house. "What did you want me to do, Ange? Tackle the man?"

"Yes!"

Jack laughed. "Angie, I didn't think you were impressed by brute force." He looked up at Michael. "I don't think it would be a good idea for Michael to see me beating on an old man."

"How long have you been communicating with him?"

"Ange. . . ."

"You've been communicating with him since the beginning of this mess?"

"No." He stopped, but Michael kept bouncing on his shoulders. "It's better if you don't know those details."

But Angela was all about the details. "Aren't you curious about what he wanted? Why he's here? What's going on with Brennan? Where Christine is?" She waited for his response, but when he remained silent, she offered her own. "Well, I am."

Jack smiled and she wondered if the world was going crazy.

Or if she was.

"Where did we go after Max left?" His tone was entirely too reasonable.

"The barn. The Kid's Farm." Exasperated, she put one hand on her hip and struck a pose that dared defiance. "We saw the rabbits. The silver fox rabbits. I read the description. They hopped around. What was I supposed to get from that? Morse code? One hop, a dash? A rest, a dot?"

"An-gie," Jack emphasized both syllables. "If we get a special visitor like that, he's going to leave us something."

"So we're back to the silver fox rabbit?" She groaned and sighed at the same time which elicited a giggle from her son. "What is he, the Easter Bunny? He didn't have a message taped to his tail and I sure as hell didn't speak to us. Is this a poop thing? We have to check the jelly beans he leaves behind?"

"Nope," said Jack reaching into his pocket. "Just one of these, taped to the fence stiles by the rabbit enclosure." He held up a USB drive. "And I left one for him by the orangutans."

oOo

"All this because he said 'he' a couple of times along with 'it' to describe this demon thing?"

Lance Sweets gave a single nod and waited. The large conference room had never quite seemed so small and claustrophobic. Trying to convince Booth that they had a means back into the case had been fraught with its own kinds of difficulties. Today's little exercise was, he hoped, more than an exercise in futility. They were stalemated with the evidence piled up against Dr. Brennan, so much so, that Agent Flynn had stopped looking elsewhere. But if he could just persuade the man there was a reasonable alternative to the evidence at hand, maybe they could press on. He had two other psychologists who agreed with him. All he had to do was. . . .

"Wait," said Agent Hayes Flynn, "I get it. You want back on this case."

"Yes."

"To prove Dr. Brennan's innocence."

"To get to the truth." He did not break eye contact with Flynn, refused to back down. The agent was staring right back, but he could see the man was considering the idea. He'd skimmed through the two reports, read through the findings pages at the end of each and had allowed him to repeat how he caught Ethan Sawyer's use of a male pronoun in describing the baby.

Flynn laid the report he'd been reading flat on the table and let the pages fall soundlessly close. "You want to go back through all the evidence? See if something was missed?"

Sweets drew in a breath and steadied himself. "The psychological profile you have on Dr. Brennan shows her to be hyper-rational, deliberate, exacting. Fiercely protective of her family or friends. You've had a chance to read it all, even had the profiler read through her books to draw insights into her mind. And while it is entirely possible that Dr. Brennan could commit murder to protect her family, it's not probable. "

"It's not probable?"

"Dr. Brennan does the work she does out of a strong moral conviction that to do so says lives by preventing the murderer from committing future murders. She also has a strong desire to see that justice is served. Her thinking generally is in terms of black or white. Only in the last few years has she even acknowledged the concept that gray areas exist. It is my studied opinion that Dr. Brennan could not commit murder because it would run counter to that moral code."

The agent's expression hadn't changed. "People step away from their moral code daily. Your impromptu profile, Doctor, still makes her a good candidate for Sawyer's murder."

"How about this? Dr. Brennan knows exactly how the lab works, what each person's responsibilities are. This murder was almost textbook—man dumped in the woods to be eaten by wolves. Given a paralytic agent to make him appear dead and cut so that the wolves would be drawn by the scent of his blood. Dr. Brennan's murders in her novels are more complex than that. Besides, knowing as much as she does about murder, the best murder is one in which no body is found. Wouldn't it be entirely within the realm of possibilities that rather than thinking she could convince people at the Jeffersonian to cover up for her, which is the only way she could have gotten away with the murder, that she would have devised some way in which the body was never found?"

"The arrest warrant was issued based on the evidence, Dr. Sweets. She was our best suspect."

"I know." He sat back and tried to maintain his neutral tone. "But there are alternative explanations for the evidence. I just think we owe it to seeing that justice is truly done in this case to. . . ."

". . . Look at all the evidence again." This time Flynn sat back in his chair. "Only a fool or a crazy person would carefully, almost painstakingly gather and document the evidence against herself. From what I've learned of Dr. Brennan, she's neither one nor the other."

Sweets bite back a triumphant, "Yes!" and donned his most professional tone. "She is a genius."

"I know. IQ off the charts. Same as this Christopher Pelant." Flynn quirked an eyebrow. "You didn't think I was paying attention? There are plenty of people here who think there's a fine line between genius and insanity and wouldn't put it past someone like Dr. Brennan to kill to protect her family. Some even think she did it, crossed the line, so to speak. Post partum insanity."

"And there are probably more people here who think she didn't do it." Flynn tapped the report on the table. "Hoping she didn't do it. Her record here as a consultant with the FBI is damned impressive."

"So, I can re-work the case?"

Flynn bobbed his head. "Re-work it, take it on a date and bring it flowers it you want. But no Booth. He's not to touch anything related to this case."

"He's been cooperative."

"He's too close."

This time, Sweets' head bobbed in agreement. "I'd like Agent Shaw to assist."

Flynn chortled. "You want it all, Dr. Sweets, don't you?" He pushed the reports toward Sweets. "Take Agent Shaw. She knows the Jeffersonian, they know her. Keep this a closed loop and me in it. Understand?"

Sweets contained another urge to shout but simply nodded. "Understood."

oOo

She could tell something had shifted when she walked into the lab that morning. Usually she just felt the smooth lines of the place in the mix of architecture—Jeffersonian old paired with Medico-Legal Lab new—played out in the quiet efficiency of the place. It had always been that way, professional and productive, old school science tempered with new school technologies.

But today it was. . . noisy.

Not everywhere, no, just coming from the one place that she did not expect noise.

"Angela?"

The artist filled her office with a strangely engaging musical selection, part reggae, part African rhythm, part. . . .

"Cam?" Angela pressed a key on her keyboard and the rich beats faded into the background. "I'm sorry, I was just. . . . Is there something you needed?"

It had been a long time since she'd seen her forensic artist smile like that or heard wild rhythms or driving beats come from her office. "I take it you had a good time at the zoo yesterday."

"Why would you say that?"

And in a microsecond, Angela had gone from the Angela of old, carefree and open, to the new Angela, suspicious and closed-off.

"Nothing." Cam drew in a deep breath and just decided to brave it. "You just seemed more yourself. Usually I come in here and you're frustrated over something to do with the Sawyer case."

Being from New York, Cam didn't often find herself using or even thinking the expression, but it seemed to be a deer in the headlights moment. The artist stood and stared before sputtering about wanting to try out a new singer and something about a broken rose and Saint Gold something when Hodgins walked in, an open laptop in hand and a boyish enthusiasm she hadn't seen from him in a while. "Ange, you've got to see. . . ."

And then it happened. Her second deer in the headlights sighting of the morning, this time with a dumbstruck Hodgins.

"All right, people," Dr. Cam Saroyan, "what the hell is. . . ."

And then she had _her_ deer in the headlights moment as she glanced at what was on the laptop monitor in Hodgins' hands.

"Oh, my God."


	5. Phase 5

**Phase 5: Paper Locks**

"You're just telling me this, now?"

Sweets was counting the number of times Agent Flynn's jaw clenched. . . four. . . five. . . six. . . and was wondering just how many spelled disaster.

"We called as soon as we were sure this was germane to the investigation." Dr. Saroyan was calm although her body language indicated she was in defensive mode. "We weren't sure what we had."

The agent snorted and pointed at the Angelatron screen. A sketch of an elderly man filled one panel, while another held a silent movie that played endlessly on a loop and the third panel held a scan.

"You have a meeting with a wanted fugitive and you were not sure of what you had?" His voice rose, and both Angela and Hodgins stiffened. "You retrieve evidence from said fugitive and you don't bother to inform the FBI until almost 12 hours later. That's obstruction of an FBI investigation."

But Cam was not backing down.

"Technically, Max Keenan is not a wanted fugitive." She was matching Agent Flynn's aggravated tone with her own tone of steady, calm authority. "Dr. Hodgins and his family were at the zoo, ran into the father of one of their friends and were given a USB drive with files on it which were heavily encrypted."

To Sweets, the interaction between Agent Flynn and Dr. Saroyan might be a fascinating exchange to a psychologist's eye, but it was potentially another way to tighten the noose around Dr. Brennan's neck, a new way to dead end the investigation.

"Sir?" Agent Shaw began to weigh in. "We had no clear evidence that Dr. Brennan was in contact with anyone in her family. I think this is a pretty clear that her father might be helping her."

"He's helping her, Shaw. Make no mistake about that." The jaw began to clench in a tight rhythm. "I'm adding Max Keenan's name to the search. Aiding and abetting."

And Flynn turned his gaze toward the Angelatron and Sweets felt any hope they had for revisiting the evidence against Dr. Brennan remained balanced on the edge of a knife.

oOo

"Here's our girl," Max Keenan cradled his granddaughter in his arms and cooed at the baby who returned his attention with giggles. "Fresh from her bath, looking like she can take on the world."

His daughter who had taken on the world and lost—_at least for the time being_—barely glanced up. "Thanks, Dad."

The area around her eyes looked dark, almost bruised in the light from the computer screen, as if she hadn't been sleeping much. She blinked hard, and he imagined the dark contacts were causing as much discomfort as was the situation.

"Take a break, honey, and take the baby." He nudged her knee with his own.

Temperance looked up, finally, and for one telling moment, he could see just how worn and tired she was. But she brightened with one look at the baby, who seemed to sense her mother's mood, becoming pensive in the exchange before brightening at her mother's smile.

"We should go to the beach today, maybe do some beachcombing." Temperance had the baby seated in her lap and was hunting in the baby's bag for a toy. "Pick up some shells and rocks. Maybe some driftwood."

He didn't like the idea of going out in public when unnecessary, especially after exposing himself at the zoo, but he also didn't like the idea of them being imprisoned inside the small cabin gathered around the light of a computer screen trying to decipher clues from a crazy man's writings.

"When do you have to return the computer?"

He shrugged and settled into the couch next to his two girls. They'd managed to rent a summer cabin for a couple of weeks before the owners came and he thought it would be nice to come back here someday and just explore the coastline with Christine. "I told Mrs. Tuttle you were reading a letter from your husband, Larry, so she said take your time. I think she just plays solitaire on the thing."

"And she doesn't have Internet access?"

"Nope. The whole idea of going to the beach is to get away from the world, not take it with you." He watched his daughter hold Christine in her lap and the two of them were engaged in a game of what he called, "Catch me if you can"—Christine's pink bunny was held just outside of the baby's reach and she could clap her hands together to try to capture her favorite toy.

Even the little bunny was looking a bit worn these days.

"You don't think Hodgins will get into trouble for this?"

He shook his head. His job was to work the angles, anticipate trouble, plan ahead, try to figure out the effect of each of their moves. Looking at the complex formula on the computer screen, he wasn't sure how it fit into the puzzle his daughter had been trying to work out in her head, but if she was right, it just might be the key to her going home with the baby.

It had been hope—a long shot, by his estimation—but hope nonetheless.

"I'm not wanted for anything. Booth would tell them I come and go. They'll have talked to Russ, too. He'll tell them the same thing."

Christine was gaining on the bunny. Each clap that captured some of the furry beast drew excited giggles, a laugh.

"You'll be connected with me now, Dad. They've got evidence now."

They'd have to separate for a while—the trip to the zoo, their present location, both put them too uncomfortably close to Washington.

He leaned in and kissed his daughter's cheek. "I'm always connected to you, honey. Always."

oOo

"Booth should see this."

She'd endured enough jabs from Hayes Flynn and she was tired of the posturing in the room. They'd screwed up, should have told the FBI they saw Max. Got it. They should have turned over the USB drive immediately. Right. Okay.

Cam had argued their case, told their side of the story and had defended them unquestionably. Good. Very good, actually. Now, let's get past this, she thought, and deal with what's important.

"Booth needs to see this."

She wasn't going to back down on that point. They could throw them off all the cases, slap her wrists some more, it didn't matter.

"I get to decide who sees what, Miss Montenegro," Shaw countered. "If you don't mind, I'm going to take this to the FBI lab for analysis."

Cam nodded sharply. That was to be expected. "But Booth really should see the video, Agent Flynn."

"I agree." Angela wanted to kiss Sweets at that moment. "I definitely agree. Psychologically speaking, Agent Booth needs to see this."

"Agent Booth might be able to give us some insights into why she's making contact with us," said Agent Shaw. "Besides, it would be too cruel not to let him see that."

She definitely wanted to hug Shaw.

Flynn was wavering. His eyes were darting between the three screens. With one step toward Dr. Saroyan, Agent Flynn was quietly trying to intimidate the forensic pathologist. "Anything involving Dr. Brennan, that includes her father, is germane to the investigation. _Anything_."

In a case full of stalemates, this was another, but it was Agent Flynn who retreated first.

"What the hell is _that_ supposed to be?"

He pointed toward the third screen. The scan was of several sheets of paper, all covered in Brennan's careful handwriting.

"It was the file on the drive," said Angela. "Well, the smaller of the two."

"And you're sure you haven't been communicating with Max Brennan or his daughter prior to today?"

Jack Hodgins had an almost Cheshire cat grin on his face, but he shook his head at the agent's question. "No. I thought I was meeting with Dr. Tony Nelson from the University of Tennessee," he repeated. "He heads up the Etymology Department there. Wanted to meet Angela and Michael while he was in town and thought the zoo would be a good place."

If he didn't believe Hodgins, Flynn body language didn't give him away. No, his body language screamed frustration and annoyance, not distrust.

"Okay." Agent Flynn cocked his head toward the screen. "What the hell does that mean?"

It didn't take any special training to figure out what the silence meant.

oOo

The silence was just too, too much.

He stood and began to retrace his steps toward the refrigerator, pulling it open, willing it to have some answers.

Instead, he stared at the assortment of take-out containers that had seemed to have multipled over the last few weeks. Grabbing the garbage can, he began to toss out the ones that had begun to look like science experiments gone bad.

"I clean cabinets," she said.

"What?"

"When I get frustrated, I go home and clean cabinets," Caroline said. "Truth is, I have the most organized, neatest cabinets on the East Coast these days."

He paused and stared at her, then looked at the Whey Chou container in his left hand. The insides looked like an alien life form was about to emerge.

"We've looked at the evidence every which way, and there's nothing left. There's that damned code, but the latest I heard was that the FBI thought it was gibberish from the diseased mind of a paranoid schizophrenic." He tossed the cardboard container in the trash. "There's no pattern, nothing to tell us that they were wrong."

"Yeah," she admitted, "it does look pretty bleak."

"Pelant wanted to take down the one group of people he thought could stop him and he succeeded."

"So, that's that?" Caroline pulled herself up and began to cross over to the coffee maker. "We sit around and tell old war stories about the good old days? " She snorted. "I'm too young for that."

Biting back a comment—_because how could you comment on that?_—he studied the contents of a one container and debated if the veggies under the clear dome were just naturally fuzzy when his phone chirped.

"Booth."

He had to ask Cam to repeat herself, but he still didn't quite believe her message.

"Cher? Booth?"

"Yeah, right." He shook the fuzziness from his brain and dumped the container in his hand into the trash. "The Jeffersonian's had contact with Max Keenan."

"Why doesn't that reassure me?"

He paused, not certain if he had heard right. "They've also got a video. A video of Christine."

oOo

He wiped the tears from his face and stared back at the screen.

Christine was looking back, her hands frozen in midair as she was about to bring them down to slap at the water in the bath. He could replay this sequence a thousand times to the same result: the air would be filled with sudsy water, his daughter would smile and laugh silently until someone wielding a large, fluffy towel would pull her from the bath.

It was impossible to know for certain whose hands were bathing her, but if he had to guess, they were Max's. Each frame was tightly cropped revealing only that his daughter was alive and well and being cared for.

He looked up at Flynn.

He would have done the same thing—called him in, put him in Bones' office and show him a few seconds of a video of his daughter just to torture him. Let him see just enough to bring the emotions to the surface, but not so much that he would lose his bargaining chip.

"There's more?" _Oh, God, he wished there was more._

Flynn looked at Sweets who was giving him that studied look he knew all too well. _Could the subject handle more?_ Sweets nodded.

"There's approximately 23 minutes." The agent had perfected the poker face. "All of your daughter. Looks to be shot over several weeks. There's no clear indicators where the images were taken or by whom. And there's no sound. Nothing to give away location or who's in the room with her."

This, he imagined, was what hell was like. Being incredibly close to seeing something to give you hope, but denied anything more than just a glimpse.

"Look, Booth," Flynn was saying as he approached the couch where he'd been sitting as he watched the short sequence on the laptop, "I just need to know if Dr. Brennan or her father has contacted you."

He shook his head.

"If they contact you. . . ."

"I report it immediately." He took a deep breath. "That's my daughter, my kid."

He didn't see what happened around him; he didn't care. All he cared about was the angelic face of his kid, smiling at the bubbles around her. She was still frozen on the screen, still happy, bubbling with joy despite everything that had happened. It was a small miracle for which he was grateful.

"I hope you understand, Booth, but I have to take the original to the FBI for analysis."

He nodded. _It was hell._

"I'm probably not helping anything by telling you this, but we have reason to believe Max Keenan is still in the area. There's a reason he wanted you to see this."

"Max wouldn't have done this willingly." He had to believe in something, and he was holding onto that belief. "He would take them as far away as possible. He wants nothing to do with all this. The man left his own family and ended up in Coos Bay, Oregon, for god's sake. "

At that moment he felt the same kind of despair and anger he had felt weeks earlier when he'd been left on the church steps. He sure as hell wasn't putting on an act for the agent.

"Why do you think Max Keenan would risk getting caught to deliver this?"

There was something comforting in having Sweets in the room asking questions. Even he could see that something had shifted and Sweets had done more than just win his battle to be let back onto the case. "Bones would have sent a message. Something." He wiped at his eyes again.

"Something more than a message that your daughter is enjoying her bath?"

While he generally liked Flynn, he wanted to shove a fist in the man's face. "Bones would have sent a message. Something more than this. She sent it through Hodgins because he's still on the case so it's more than likely case related."

Flynn sighed.

There was something in the sigh, something in this whole convoluted situation that made him look away from his daughter's face toward Flynn, then Sweets.

_There was more._

"Dr. Brennan sent a key to the code that Dr. Ethan Sawyer left on the wall of his hospital room. A partial key."

Like Cam's earlier message, he wanted desperately to have Sweets repeat himself to convince himself he'd heard right.

"Bones never saw that thing on the wall. She knew about it, but she never. . . she left."

The sequence of events had been painful enough to relive for the FBI that night. It hadn't gotten easier over the last few weeks.

"That code hasn't left this lab." Flynn seemed to be considering something. "If she never saw it, how could she figure out a key for it? Dammit, even I can see she's got the symbols right."

Sometimes Bones could think of something with the speed of light, or throw him for a loop with all of the accumulated information she knew. But this?

"She talked to Sawyer. She probably figured out that the message was for her."

"She's got a key for some of that code, Booth. Either Sawyer told her what he was doing, or someone's given her the code to break."

Booth stood up, slowly and deliberately. "I have never seen the code from Sawyer's room. You haven't let anyone near it unless they came to the lab to look at it." He felt practically giddy. "I haven't been near the lab in weeks. I haven't had anything to do with the investigation."

"There's a third possibility," said Sweets. "She figured out how Ethan Sawyer would put together the message. She figured out the message."

Booth could feel Flynn's eyes on him.

"Anyway you look at it," Flynn said, "it's either a criminal act that got us to this point, or an act of pure genius."


	6. Phase 6

**Phase 6: Paper Locks**

oOo

"She's only given us part of the message, Jack, and it's all words. Brennan said she thought it would be a computer code."

If there was a whine in her voice, fine, so be it. There was something about the reappearance of Max Keenan and the video and _this_ that was giving her something she hadn't had in quite some time and, frankly, she liked it.

Hope.

And frustration.

And more frustration.

No, she had had the frustration for some time now, thank you, and she didn't like that in the least. It was just that it looked like they had something and it ended up being what they had before—just with a bit more confusion.

"We'll get there, Ange," Jack said. "Brennan wouldn't have risked having her father get this to us and not have it mean something."

"It's just that. . . ." She let that thought fritter away. They were all feeling it, a dull ache that could not be erased simply by the appearance of Max Keenan. "The baby looked good. Happy."

"Like being on the run is part of her DNA?" Jack teased. "A Brennan family trait?"

"Yeah, the life. Amber alerts, APBs. Your kid's face in every WalMart in the country, your face on the FBI's Most Wanted posters. Your picture flashed on billboards along highways."

"Yeah, the life." Jack's smile faded. "I don't know, Ange. Maybe the rest of the message is found in those papers Brennan had me get for her from American University."

"Don't tell me, no, you didn't." Cam was in mid-flight into the artist's office, frozen by Jack's words.

"I didn't."

Cam drew in a deep breath. "You didn't get papers from American University? For Dr. Brennan?"

"Cam. . . ?" Angela started, but Cam finished with a hand held up like a stop sign and a shake of her head.

"_No._ No stories, no games. _Just_ _the truth_."

Cam was in full authority mode, one arm crossed against her waist, the other arm punctuating her point.

And she was fierce.

Very fierce.

"Agent Flynn didn't ask. . . ."

"_No, Dr. Hodgins._ I want to know exactly what you know that you didn't tell Agent Flynn. If we want to continue working the case against Pelant, we need to be honest with the FBI."

There was a moment when Angela wondered if Jack was just going to walk out or lash out. He had that wild-eyed look she'd only seen in him a few times, when he could barely contain his emotions. "It's been three months." He drew out each word ragged with his own fierceness. "_Three months._ We did exactly what Pelant expected and we did what the FBI wanted and we're no closer than we were _three months_ ago."

"Pelant could do the same thing to anyone of us, Cam. But he did it to Brennan. _To Brennan_."

They all stood silent in the truth. Pelant had crippled them and playing by the rules had allowed them to stay in the game, but they were playing by rules that could change any minute.

And as the silence in the room grew, Angela began to fear that this, too, would fall apart: what was left of the team, the small group of people who still believed in Brennan, could fall apart, too.

"Jack left a USB drive near the orangutan enclosure with Ethan Sawyer's personal papers from American University."

She was hoping to break the stalemate with the admission, but both Cam and Jack seemed deeply entrenched on their sides of the battle, neither one of them wavering.

And she was worried about Jack. Normally he was the one trying to make her feel better, trying to ease her out of the worry and the fear for her friend. But she could see just how deep his own fears were.

"Cam, Brennan's never seen the code," she argued. "No one's shared evidence with her since she was removed from the case. But somehow she's figured out these symbols, God only knows how. And she's figured out what they mean. At least some of them."

Angela saw Cam soften a little while Jack was just trying to pull himself together.

"Maybe Brennan knows there's something in those papers. Jack didn't give Brennan any evidence. Just think of it as he left her some magazines to read."

Cam closed her eyes and Angela wondered if that was accompanied by a slow count to 10. The way things were going, maybe to 100. Or 1000.

"He had journals he kept, personal papers. Only faculty can sign them out." Jack was finding his equilibrium again, but he was struggling. "I didn't even sign for them."

Cam opened her eyes. "How did you get them?"

"After Dr. Sawyer's death, there was some interest in publishing his works. Dr. Gilbert in the math department there had already signed them out and had scanned them. She did me a favor."

"It's not like he gave them money or even directions out of town, Cam."

Cam closed her eyes again and was shaking her head. "Flynn is not Booth. He doesn't have absolute faith in us to do our jobs objectively, especially on this case." She opened her eyes and was catching them both in her look. "I will not give them any cause to remove us from this case. Booth and Dr. Brennan," she said, her voice catching, "Dr. Brennan needs us to find the truth."

"Are you going to tell them, Cam?"

Angela thought she knew the answer, but as each second passed, her doubt grew.

"No," Cam said finally. "As long as those journals cannot be traced back to the Jeffersonian and as long as they are not aiding in her evasion of law enforcement."

"Dr. Gilbert is in Kenya for the next two years building water treatment facilities for villagers." Jack offered. "Very remote villages, deepest parts of the jungle."

"You can look at the journals, Cam," Angela added. "It would take a miracle for someone to make sense out of them. Jack was trying to decipher them last night."

Cam shook her head, sighing, and turned her attention toward the monitor. "So we have words, but no computer code?"

On the left hand screen was the code from Sawyer's wall. In the middle was the partial translation. On the far right was the key supplied by Dr. Brennan.

Angela tried turning the code on its side. "Hexagons drive polynomials blank blank."

"Maybe it's the other way, Ange."

"Triangulations performance blank blank blank," she read. "Lots of blanks, co-efficients blank polynomials."

"I'm thinking Ethan Sawyer's hallucinations," Cam said grimly, "might have rubbed off on Dr. Brennan."

"We still have a lot of code to figure out, Angela." Jack turned his head sideways to read the screen, but it was no use.

That was the thing about hope, thought Angela. It was as full of holes as their mystery code.

oOo

"So, where do we start?"

Agent Genevieve Shaw had endured demanding FBI training and years of working under some very exacting agents, so she was well able to maintain a professional front despite his dumb question. "Dr. Sweets, you're the one who convinced Agent Flynn that we should revisit the case against Dr. Brennan."

Sweets backtracked. "No, see, it was more of a rhetorical question. Where do we start?" His original plan shifted slightly. "I. . . I think we need to approach this as any investigation. We need to be objective. We're going to do what Booth and Brennan do, _did_, when they are, _were_, at their best." He straightened his shoulders and just plunged forward. "We follow the evidence wherever it takes us."

That won Shaw's guarded approval. "The lab was unable to discredit the video." She continued to enumerate their obstacles. "There's the hair, the money transfer, the plant as well as Dr. Brennan's extensive knowledge of human anatomy."

"No, no," said Sweets. "I think we should start over. You do the investigative portion, the cop portion. I'll handle the science. We want to look at everything with a fresh set of eyes and we want to be open to all possibilities."

"So, I'm Agent Booth and you're Dr. Brennan."

If there was ever an incongruous image, Sweets wondered, it would be that one—him as Dr. Brennan. He shook it off. "We want to see if there were any avenues of inquiry that were shortchanged."

"But we're still convinced that Dr. Brennan is the perpetrator."

Something about the way she said it—_Dr. Brennan and_ _perpetrator_—that made him pause.

"Do you think she did it?"

He'd thought of Shaw as an ally. He hadn't considered that she saw this as a means of tightening the case against the fugitive anthropologist.

"I am a sworn law officer working for the United States government to apprehend and detain those citizens who violate the law."

His hopes sank. "I thought that. . . you've worked with. . . ," he sputtered, "Right. We have to play our parts."

Shaw remained impassive. "If, in investigating this case, we were to stumble upon Dr. Brennan, I would arrest her. It's my sworn duty."

"Right."

"We have to look at everything. Even if it makes things worse for Dr. Brennan."

"I can't think of anything worse."

"Right." Shaw hesitated. "Dr. Sweets?"

He tried to put on his best professional face and nodded. "Yes, Agent Shaw?"

"Just because I'm sworn to uphold the law," she said, "doesn't mean I agree with what's happened."

oOo

"She was a brilliant scientist who was one of the finest minds in forensic anthropology which is why she was the overwhelming choice among students seeking a graduate adviser in the field," said Dr. Marisol Whitmeyer as she breezed into her office. "Didn't hurt that she was also a best-selling author. That's the public relations statement. Off the record, she was as cold as the bodies she examined and had only a quarter of the personality."

It was only when she was caught in the cross glares from himself and Caroline did Whitmeyer pause.

"That's what you're after, right? The official statement along with a colorful sound bite on Dr. Brennan and then it's on to the loony professor?" She sat down behind her desk. "Damaged professor kills even more damaged professor, film at 11?"

"We're not from the press, Dr. Whitmeyer, we're here from the FBI," Caroline delivered in her driest tone. "We're looking for the truth, not a sound bite before the latest news on what's-her-face's wardrobe malfunction."

Whitmeyer finally looked at both of them and Booth wondered how many others were taking this opportunity to get their 15 minutes of fame at Brennan's expense. He'd long ago quit reading the newspapers or watching the news.

"FBI? I was just told some people had questions about Dr. Sawyer's death." Whitmeyer paused and nodded her head in his direction. "You're the partner." But recognition didn't mean relief from her assessment of Brennan. "I thought Dr. Brennan's ego was going to catch up with her eventually. Karma and all. Oh, how the mighty have fallen."

"We just wanted to ask you about Dr. Sawyer," Booth said trying to ignore her comments.

"That's novel," Whitmeyer noted. "Most people want to talk about Dr. Brennan." She swiveled her chair. "Dr. Sawyer spent the last two years in a mental institution. Dr. Brennan must have been a little crazed herself to think Ethan would harm her child from there."

Booth crossed to the desk. "You worked with Ethan Sawyer before he was committed to Hinsdale." He pushed aside his dislike for the woman. "We want to know about his time here, working here."

"Ethan was absolutely brilliant. His work will live on in robotics and computerized. . . ," Whitmeyer continued before Caroline stopped her.

"We get it. You want to get in some practice before the reporters get here." She rose up and crowded the desk with Booth. "Dr. Sawyer was in no condition to teach his classes so you helped him get a research grant. Some think tank. But he was still lecturing."

Booth looked at Caroline, grateful for her presence.

Whitmeyer screwed up her mouth and tapped the desk with her finger. With a huff, she rolled back her chair and got up from the desk, then pointed toward the wall. "Ethan did these seminars. Teachers here have to actively teach, they can't just work in a lab or write books." She directed them to a photo of Ethan Sawyer. "He did a series of seminars, artificial intelligence and its promise for the future kind of thing. Ethan could handle the hour, hour and a half for the seminar, the hour afterward for questions and discussion. He didn't need much prep time because it was all in his head."

Booth peered at the photos. The hall was full. "Was there a list of people who signed up?"

Whitmeyer seemed put out by the question. "Only graduate or undergraduate students needed to sign in." At Caroline's look she added, "For brownie points with their professors. Serious students write papers analyzing points made in the seminar. University higher ups don't just accept the honors system. This is American University."

"Do you have more photos?" Booth could see something familiar in how Whitmeyer looked at Sawyer's photo. "You attended them all, didn't you?"

The hardness of the woman disappeared for a moment and Booth knew he was right.

With a single nod, she retraced her path to the desk and opened a lower drawer. She laid a large photo album on the desk. "He was absolutely brilliant. He could have done some great work still, but he was cut down like that and fed to animals."

"Dr. Brennan didn't do that, cher." Caroline's voice was actually soothing. "A man by the name of Christopher Pelant released him, drugged him and left him as a snack for the wolves. You really think a world-class forensic anthropologist wouldn't have done a better job of hiding the body?"

Booth gauged the woman's reaction. Even through her bitterness, she seemed stunned.

"But the papers said. . . ."

"If Pelant could do this to a man in a psychiatric hospital, think of what he could do to a woman sitting in a jail cell. Or to her baby." Caroline was using her best arguments. "Pelant killed a man and then used all kinds of computer codes and transfer orders to have the body destroyed under the noses of the police transporting the body. What chance did Dr. Sawyer have? Dr. Brennan just had the good sense to see the potential disaster and took matters into her own hands."

He tried his hunch. "Ever hear of Christopher Pelant?"

"Pelant?" she asked. Caroline had softened the woman's edges considerably.

"Hactivist. Took down a Department of Defense website. It was in all the papers," Caroline intoned. "Might have even made the 11 o'clock news."

"I don't know a Pelant."

"But did Ethan Sawyer know him?" he asked.

Whitmeyer shook her head and sank into her seat. "I don't know who Ethan knew. If he came to the seminars. . . Ethan was hanging on by a thread. The medication wasn't working and he couldn't control the episodes."

"Christopher Pelant destroyed two people with one murder," Caroline was explaining while Booth began looking through the photo album. "Four if you count an innocent baby and Dr. Brennan's partner. Framing Dr. Brennan for Dr. Sawyer's murder turned out to be pretty damned effective in giving this Christopher Pelant free rein to get up to all kinds of mischief, murder and such."

So was playing a hunch, thought Booth, as he found a photo that chilled him to the bone.

"Caroline?"

He pushed the opened photo album toward the former prosecutor.

In one photo, Ethan Sawyer was talking to a slightly younger version of Christopher Pelant.

"And all this time, cher, I didn't think Dr. Brennan played hunches."

oOo

"He's got to have help," Sweets said. "Like minded individuals, anarchists, people with a beef with the U.S. government."

"That's speculation," Shaw countered, "and Dr. Brennan doesn't do speculation."

Sweets stopped the pacing in his office and squeezed the ball in his hand. "I told you I can't do Dr. Brennan. Well," he added hastily, somewhat embarrassed by the choice of words. "I can't act like Dr. Brennan."

"But what if you're right?" Shaw began to look through a folder on the coffee table. "Pelant had library books delivered. We should see if it was the same person each time."

"Food deliveries," Sweets offered. "The cable guy."

"Some funny parts."

"What?"

"The movie." This time Shaw seemed slightly embarrassed. "It's kind of cheesy humor, slapstick, more of a guy. . . ," she waved it off. "Bad joke. I think I'm getting punchy."

"Booth does that. Usually just uses his fists, though." He practically cringed. "Yeah, right. I think we've both had it."

"But we've made some progress," Shaw added quickly. "We look at deliveries to Pelant's place. Have the techs go through that book Dr. Brennan got from Dr. Sawyer again. Compare the list of books in Sawyer's room to those Pelant checked out. Look into the staff at the hospital. See if any of them could have given someone access to the security system."

"We need to look into that security system. Their computer system," Sweets added. "See how it's vulnerable. It might explain the video."

Shaw added that to the list they'd made on the yellow legal pad. "It's not a lot. The best thing we might have is that code and no one's cracked it yet."

Sweets nodded, deep in his own thoughts. Knowing Max Keenan as he did, he doubted that the old con would have broken cover without prodding from Dr. Brennan. "How is Dr. Brennan coming up with the symbols?"

"Should I add that to the list?"

He thought on that. If she was doing some kind of research, her best source of materials would be libraries containing Ethan Sawyer's work. Universities. Colleges. And that might help someone locate Dr. Brennan.

"No," he said finally. "No. It's not relevant to what we're investigating. Let's focus on what we've already got."

oOo

Normally she didn't survey the lab below the second floor lounge as if it were her kingdom—she knew she was in charge and she knew she had final authority on what happened there. But it had never quite been hers alone. She had figured that out long ago and had been reminded of that fact when the Jeffersonian board had closed the Medico Legal lab when Dr. Brennan had gone off to do research in Maluku.

And now?

She was doing everything in her power to keep the lab functioning—including playing nice with the FBI agent assigned to them. She had a more than competent forensic anthropologist in Dr. Edison and a cadre of rotating interns to take up the slack. But nothing seemed right.

"Dr. Saroyan?"

She turned toward her youngest intern. "Finn."

He's started out as a troubled kid in need of a break and he had someone wormed his way into her foster daughter's heart and hers as well. "Ma'am, Dr. Edison sent me to inform you that we've got a complete report on the antemortem injuries sustained by our victim."

"Anything surprising?"

"No, ma'am." He touched the brim of his cap. "Unless of course you find it odd that the victim fell off of a bicycle when she was 19 or so."

She practically laughed.

"Well, that's nice to see."

"Our victim falling off of a bicycle?"

Finn shook his head. "No, ma'am. It's nice to see you smile like that. I know we deal in death around here, but it's like a constant wake for our favorite Aunt Sally. Don't no one wants to be the first to crack a smile lik'n it might be disrespectful."

Ahh, Finn, she thought. "Yes," she agreed. "It has been a might gloomy around here."

"Please don't take this the wrong way, Dr. Saroyan, but things aren't quite the same around here given the situation." He wound up. "See'n me go down a rabbit hole, Dr. Brennan would be right there to pull me out before I got too far, but with Dr. Edison, he's more'n likely to head down there with me."

She did laugh this time. "Meaning what, exactly, Mr. Abernathy?"

"Meanin', it just takes a might longer to get to our destination than it did before, especially with all the side trips we've been takin'."

"You miss working with Dr. Brennan."

"That I do." He paused. "And I can see you do, too."

"Between Cam and Finn," she started, "I am worried."

Taking off his cap, he smoothed back his hair. "I appreciate the confidence. And as my boss. . . ."

"Everything is fine."

Finn gave her a curt nod and returned the cap to his head. "By the way, Dr. Saroyan, I was wondering if you're thinking of changing professions. I signed for some law journals from Georgetown."

"Law journals?"

"Yes, indeed. Young lady made me sign for them before she'd leave them in your office."

Law journals? It was probably the least weird thing that had happened in the lab that day, she thought.

"Probably sent to the wrong part of the Jeffersonian, Finn."

oOo

He felt the slight lurch as the elevator began its descent.

"You know, I was thinking, Dr. Sweets. If we believe that Christopher Pelant set up Dr. Brennan, then he would have put Ethan Sawyer's hair in her Prius."

It was a possibility. "Her car is probably in storage." He thought it was worth another look. "So we ask the techs to look for evidence of Pelant having done something to the car?"

"Or left something behind."

"It is a long shot, Agent Shaw."

"Well, you did say we should be open to all possibilities."

He nodded. "That I did. Be Dr. Brennan. Look at everything, know everything about the case."

He thought his delivery, meant to elicit a smile from the young agent, would have done just that, but a glimpse of the agent's face told him he had failed to lighten the mood.

"I was also thinking that Pelant might have accessed their home as well."

Possibilities, he thought. Lots of possibilities. "The FBI has been in the home twice. Once when the initial search warrant was issued, a second time when Dr. Brennan went on the lam. Look for anything which would give them an idea where she might have gone." He didn't think he could sell this idea. "Booth won't like it. His privacy and Dr. Brennan's have been blown wide open."

"I know, Dr. Sweets," Shaw returned. "But we need to consider all possibilities."

oOo

Her lungs burned, but she was almost to the car, _almost there._ She pushed through the underbrush, felt the branches clawing at her, heard the cracks and snaps of twigs as her legs took her steps closer.

Something had gone wrong. Horribly wrong. She'd gotten back to the cottage fifteen minutes earlier than she had arranged with her father, but there were lights everywhere, red and blue police lights coloring the night sky, Mrs. Tuttle's cottage lights ablaze as well as their cottage's.

And their car was gone.

There were no sirens, no screams of cars racing through the streets, so her father had gotten away with the baby.

He had to have gotten away with the baby.

Unless the police already towed the car. Unless they had already been taken in to custody and she had missed them.

Cuts seared the skin on her arms as the branches of the trees caught at her. Holding the box of seashells as a shield, she tried to keep her face from being scratched.

It was one of his rules: _don't draw attention to yourself._

She could hide the scratches on her arms, the abrasions on her legs. But despite how good she was at makeup these days, she couldn't hide everything.

_Run_.

The crashing through the underbrush, through the woods, through the long grass, all that had to be attributed to animals. Night creatures.

She was a creature of the night, these days. _People are groggier at night. The lighting's worse. _

Her father's words, his rules. He'd left her behind long before she'd had to endure a father's rules and she had had to make up rules of her own to survive. And now?

Now there was only one rule: _Run_.

She'd gone to the town library to use the computer to read the rest of Ethan's papers. An easy walk—just a half mile. She could blend into the night in her dark clothes, be another of the endless tourists.

_Blend in, Tempe. Be invisible._

They'd parked the second car almost ten miles away in a field of abandoned, rusted cars where it had almost blended right in with the other derelicts half-buried in kudzu. The car didn't look like much, but it had a full tank and a cache of food and baby items and cash. She couldn't remember if it had a change of clothes or not, and she didn't care.

It just had to be there.

Gripping the box of shells tighter, she cursed herself for not putting something inside to stop the soft taps they made with each movement.

_Don't take souvenirs, Tempe, _her father had warned._ Leave nothing and take nothing. _

She'd already broken one of his cardinal rules for being a fugitive—_divorce yourself completely from your other life. _

But she had broken so much—the greatest of which was certainly Booth's heart.

And now?

She couldn't even keep her baby safe or protect her father who was protecting her.

All she could do was run. And hope.

Feeling rather than seeing the terrain change beneath her feet, she changed speed, then stopped and found a tree and leaned against it, tried to school her breathing to something quieter than the hard rasps coming from her.

And looked around her. _Be aware of your surroundings at all times, honey. _

The night remained grays against black, only distant lights behind her. And nothing ahead of her.

Gulping in air, she looked for the marker they had set in place the other day. A hobo code? she'd asked. Her father had warmed to the idea. Yes, a hobo code.

They had lots of codes and signals these days. Any mention of eating out meant they needed to leave soon. Any mention of eating meat meant it was a dangerous place.

But there were no signals at the cottage. Nothing.

Just the night ablaze with another of her failures. Another mistake.

She placed the box at her feet and felt in her pockets for money and her ID as well as the USB drive. In the darkness she couldn't count the money, but it was all bills—coins made too much noise. They'd hidden two sets of keys near the car.

Picking up the box, she clutched it tightly as she felt the terrain change from the woods to a dirt road. _Turn left and walk three-quarters of a mile._

Or run.

She eased into a pace and heard the rattle of shells against cardboard announcing her movements, so she slowed to a fast walk.

There was a meeting place and a second one. And a fall back position if they should become separated for too long.

And a phone number.

And an email address to be used only in the direst of emergencies.

_Plan ahead,_ Max had taught her. _Build in back ups in case something doesn't go right._

The night sounds didn't hide the soft clip-clop of her shoes against the dirt. She slowed further.

In three days her father would be at the place. Three days before she'd see Christine. Three days before she knew what had happened.

But she was not a woman who placed her faith in hope. She believed in what she could taste, touch and see.

And in the gray of night, she could make out the stone fence and counted 7 stones east, three down and pulled at the loose stone.

One key.

Guarding it carefully, she transferred it to her pocket and began to count the mounds of kudzu-covered cars. One. Two. Three.

Three.

Three?

Three wasn't there.


	7. Phase 7

**Phase 7: Paper Locks**

oOo

"Fingerprints on the paper confirm it's from Dr. Brennan," Agent Flynn announced as he pocketed his phone. "I've got our people analyzing the law journals for additional evidence."

Exasperated with the glacier-like efficiency of the FBI techs, Angela bit back a comment. But that didn't stop Cam. "So, can we finally upload the symbols and add them to our analysis of Ethan Sawyer's code?"

Angela secretly wanted to cheer Cam, but she tried to maintain a neutral expression while the FBI agent stared granite-faced at the wide-screen monitor.

"She hasn't seen these before?"

"I couldn't really tell you if Dr. Brennan saw these individual symbols before or not," Cam said, her patience wearing just a bit, "but I can tell you that she's never seen the code from Dr. Sawyer's room."

Tell the FBI guy what you told him before and repeat for good measure, thought Angela. Cam, God love her, was not backing down.

"I'd think you'd want to send someone out to talk to Pelant and find out just how well he knew Ethan Sawyer." Jack practically punched the air with his words. "It's possible that Pelant was afraid of what Sawyer knew about him."

Jack, too, wasn't backing down. Booth had relayed his information to Agent Shaw who had completed the pipeline to Flynn who had somehow seen fit to tell them.

For his part, Agent Hayes Flynn half groaned, half sighed and Angela just wanted the man to leave so they could get back to work.

"I've got your full report on the Summers case?"

Switch tactics when this one isn't working, Angela thought. The man could be exasperatingly evasive.

"Yes." Cam refused to let the evidence go without a fight. "Dr. Brennan sent the information to _me_. It means she trusts _me_ to use it to help decode Dr. Sawyer's message."

Flynn had come in and wondered aloud if they weren't all just too close to the Sawyer case to continue handling evidence. But Cam wasn't about to lose some control on the case.

"You have as much said that you think this code is a blind alley, a red herring," Cam argued, "pick your cliché. But I have people who want to work this angle. We believe it is our best chance to get at the truth of who or what is responsible for Dr. Sawyer's death."

Flynn stood there silent for so long that Angela wondered if he was just going to wait them out. Then the great stone face spoke.

"This lab has earned its reputation for integrity and thoroughness." Flynn held Cam's eyes with his own. "I trust the Jeffersonian will continue to pursue the truth, wherever it takes you."

And with that, he left.

Stunned, they all stood in silence in front of Angela's monitor.

"Can someone tell me, " Dr. Edison asked, "what the hell just happened?"

"He blinked first." Jack grinned. "We won."

"For now," Cam said, quietly. "For now."

oOo

"That's a match."

It wasn't said so much with excitement at the discovery as with a sense of satisfaction in being right.

Sweets looked at their slowly growing list. "Okay, but what does that tell us?"

Agent Shaw paused from looking through the papers and clearly was giving his question some thought. "It means that we have a pattern, that's all. But it seems consistent with what he's been doing."

Sweets tapped his notepad with his pen. He was used to looking for patterns in human behavior, but patterns didn't always spell out hard evidence. Physical evidence often trumped psychological insights.

"So we know that Pelant had fairly regular contact with the library delivery guy. He's got a regular delivery from the local grocery as well as the pizza place down the street." Sweets continued to tap at the pad. "It doesn't spell out murder."

"No, but it suggests other people to be interviewed. A widening circle of possibilities."

"More information, more knowledge, a better understanding of our primary suspect." Flynn and others might point toward Dr. Brennan as their primary in Sawyer's death, but Christopher Pelant was still his first choice.

"These series of seminars are absolutely. . . wow." Shaw leafed through the transcripts. "Modeling human behavior so that it could be programmed into machines that could think like humans. Wow!"

He could barely make out the math, barely understood the equations that Sawyer was creating, but he understood the concepts behind them and he was making himself more and more familiar with the whole realm of artificial intelligence.

"Do you think that's what he was doing?"

Sweets looked up from the report in his hand. "Sawyer?"

"I'm sorry," Shaw said. "I'm getting ahead of myself. Pelant. I meant Pelant." She rested the transcripts in her lap. "He wants to make a statement about the lies that government tells us and brings down the DOD website. Murders one woman to point out a secret in the FBI vaults and then uses lies showing just how devastating it can be to frame someone for murder and destroys a person's career and family in the process."

She'd summed up Pelant's twisted motivations, thought Sweets, and characterized the aftermath of his actions a little too well.

"I don't think Pelant's reasons for hurting Dr. Brennan or Agent Booth was as lofty as that, Shaw," Sweets countered. "He set out to destroy anybody he thought might be able to hold him accountable."

oOo

He leaned his head against the cool of the mirror and closed his eyes.

Somehow, he was losing them.

He patted the pocket that held the DVD Angela had burned for him and knew that he could simply put that into the player and watch his baby or pull out a photo album and see his partner, but he was losing them. Closing his eyes he could sometimes remember how the baby felt in his arms, or how she sounded when she cooed, or remember how she smelled fresh from her bath.

And Bones. . . .

He was losing the sense of her, too.

They'd never just been partners in their complicated, convoluted relationship. Never just friends. They'd never just been one thing or the other. He'd known her for years and had almost always seen the broken child wrapped up in that strong, stubborn woman, had almost always seen the how and the why of what she did, and somehow he had never seen it coming—her driving off without him.

It still stung, hitting him at odd times, crippling him momentarily with the pain in that memory, the pain in that loss.

"Booth?"

He heard his name before the knocking at the door jarred him back to the here and now. "Agent Booth? Our table is ready."

He sent a prayer to watch over his family, to keep them safe, to bring them home.

Then he schooled his features.

Caroline had stuck with him that afternoon as they watched Agent Shaw and a crew of techs bag and tag the evidence on the scene. Two photo albums. Three photos of Ethan Sawyer in close proximity to one Christopher Pelant. Each dated to a specific seminar. Each seminar topic to be probed and analyzed and dissected.

Shaw had taken Whitmeyer's statement, contacted the dean of the college for the lists of students who had attended Sawyer's seminars.

Then he'd watched helplessly as Shaw drove off without him.

"Caroline thought you might be redecorating or something in there," Sweets joked as they made their way to their table. "Sent me to find you."

"Sweets? Is this cloak and dagger stuff really necessary?"

Another restaurant serving good old American favorites at inflated prices. A new venue for an old conversation, he thought.

"The Jeffersonian got another fragment of the code from Dr. Brennan."

He'd barely sat down when Sweets sprang the news on him. "What? She get it to Angela this time? Behind some painting at the art museum?"

He didn't care for the bitterness that had crept into his voice.

"She sent it to Cam, actually," Sweets said. "The how of how she's sending these messages is very telling and gives us. . . ."

He ignored Caroline's worried look. "Bottom line it for me, Sweets. Don't get shrinky on me, just out with it."

Sweets pouted. "She sent it through Georgetown University's interlibrary loan system."

"Georgetown?" Bones was almost close enough to touch.

"My guess is she's long gone."

He nodded slowly.

"Cher, she's being careful. Sends it off and then skedaddles." Caroline's eyes tried to encourage him. "But there's a good reason she's sending this code stuff to Dr. Hodgins and to Cam."

"She can't involve you in this." Sweets was leaning in, his voice going soft and gentle which he found almost as annoying as the new-found anger that Bones had cut him out of this code business, too. "Dr. Hodgins thinks he's meeting a colleague. Cam gets some delivery from a university library she's not expecting. It's all plausible deniability."

"You've already been through the FBI ringer, cher." Caroline's voice, too, had lost its hard edges as the afternoon had turned into evening. "Dr. Brennan knows just how much poking and prodding you've already gone through because she used to do the poking and prodding."

That part of him which could look a killer in the eye and remain icy calm understood, but he was still awash in a sea of emotions—anger and fear, sorrow and hurt.

And somewhere in there just an island of hope.

"You guys had a good day," Sweets said as the waitress arrived. "Agent Shaw and I put a couple of things into motion, but you guys really had the best day of all of us."

The investigator in him knew that, too.

"Seeley Booth," Caroline said as she jabbed his arm, "you need to keep one thing in mind."

"What's that?" he asked as he rubbed his arm.

"We've got to have all our big brains working on this for it to come out right," Caroline said as she picked up her water glass, "and now we've got the biggest one of all working this case again in Dr. Brennan."

oOo

She was lost.

_Pay attention to where we're going and how we're getting there, honey. _

Tired, sore, worried—she could barely make out the most recent advice from her father from that he gave her when she was a child. He'd taken them out camping years ago and took her aside and led her deeper and deeper into the woods. _Pay attention to where we're going and how we're getting there, honey. _ He'd shown her how to navigate by the stars—_look for the North Star. See the orientation of the Big Dipper._ _Don't be afraid of the dark, but use all your senses to navigate. _His words of wisdom mixed with her mother's and somehow she'd managed to find her way out.

Fading to the ground, exhausted, she only knew she was near an island of trees in a grassy field. A faint glow appeared in the east and she calculated the sunrise to be close to 5:20 this time of year. She'd been walking and running since almost 10 that night stopping only as necessary to rest. At approximately 4.8 miles per hour over uneven terrain multiplied by the hours and factoring in the miles she ran initially— no, it would take more than a week to get to their next rendezvous and that was only if she walked continuously.

She rubbed at her legs and decided to inventory what assets she had. _Always know your assets, Tempe. Money, tradable items. _

Her money was a limp wad from her pocket. Two hundred fifteen dollars. One ID. A box of seashells.

She needed water, a safe place to rest. Food.

And where the hell was she?

Heading northwest from the auto graveyard, she'd only veered west when she'd hit a fenceline, following that for its length before switching back to a northerly direction. A few calculations and she had a general idea if she could trust her memory of the map she'd seen a few days ago. If she kept heading north she'd hit a small town, then another. West took her to a major highway. East?

Stretching her tired leg muscles, she decided northeast made sense. Her father wouldn't like it; he favored small to medium sized towns. But to the northeast she could get lost in a good sized city, get what she needed, get some rest.

The money wouldn't last long, but if she was right about the code, she might not need to be a fugitive much longer.

If.

There were just too many variables: had Hodgins gotten her first set of symbols? Did Cam receive the second set? Did they understand what they meant? Was anyone still working the case?

And where was her father? And Christine?

No matter how detailed their plans, things could and did go wrong. No sirens probably meant they hadn't caught up with Max and didn't know about her. She took a deep breath and as she brought up her hand to brush the hair from her face, caught the dampness on the front of her blouse. Christine would be well past her feeding—she could practically time the baby's feedings by her leaking breasts.

Where the hell were they?

Life on the lam with her father had taught her one thing—he was committed to her safety and to the safety of the baby. She'd learned long ago that indulging in speculation only wasted time, but if she could trust her father, he would be at the first meeting spot in three days. Her friends? They were still working the case in whatever capacity they could. She could be sure of Hodgins—hadn't he gotten her the papers? And Angela. Always Angela.

Cam? She'd have to be involved given the new set of symbols. She'd have to bring in the FBI.

And Booth?

Booth.

He'd somehow seeped into her and become part of her DNA as irrational as that seemed. And she knew him almost as well as she knew herself.

It would be a controlled burn by now, but he would still be angry with her. Guilty for not being able to protect her or Christine. Hurt by what she had done.

And he still wouldn't give up.

She took off her shoes and pulled off her socks and shook them out. Her feet ached, but there was no chance for a long hot soak.

It only made sense to keep going. Somehow, she had done this for the baby and for Booth. She had to see this through for them.

Booth may have already forgiven her—she sometimes marveled at the capacity for a metaphorical heart to forgive. Certainly he would know she had had few options.

Like now.

Fighting the urge to just lay down if only to ease the achiness in her muscles and the dullness in her head, she put on her socks and shoes and tried to stand. She teetered for a moment, but found her center of gravity again and bent to pick up the box.

The shells rattled dully inside the cardboard and as irrational as it was, she took some comfort in having the familiar sound.

Looking toward the brightening sky, she began to consider how she could meet some of her more immediate needs and how to get a message to her father. Then she pressed on toward the awakening day.

oOo

"Very funny, Booth."

Hayes Flynn tossed a photocopy of a journal toward him. "Page 347. 'Law Enforcement Pre-conceived Ideas Regarding Fugitives: A Comparative Analysis.'" His eyes beaded in on him. "Your partner's got a sense of humor."

It wouldn't be the first thing he'd say about Bones, but he had to agree, it was a good choice of article if she was testing out her sense of irony. "You sure Brennan sent you this?"

Hayes snorted, shook his head and gave him a wry smile. "Full fingerprint set on the glossy cover of the journal in case we were going to look."

"She doesn't do anything halfway." Booth folded himself into his chair and spread his hands on his desk, trying to look as calm as possible.

"It gets better." Flynn continued to stand. "She sent a second article about a case in which a parolee had circumvented his ankle monitor."

Flynn was an easy read this morning—100% annoyance.

"She's thorough. You've read her profile."

If Flynn wanted a game, Booth was going to give him one. He'd spent much of the night watching and re-watching as his daughter grew before his eyes in the short video Bones had somehow managed to send him and he was going to be damned before he gave the FBI or anyone anything more to hang on his partner.

But Flynn wasn't there for a game of wills. "I'm telling you this information as one FBI agent to another, Booth. There's more."

"I know about the code. You gave Sweets permission. . . ."

"Not the code, Booth." Flynn went to the door and closed it. "Strictly confidential," he said as he sat down across from Booth. "Two nights ago local police in a small coastal village in North Carolina busted a drug dealer. As part of the warrant, they searched his aunt's place thinking he might have stashed some drugs or money there. She runs a small seaside retreat, rents out most of the cabins to regulars. He stays with her part of the year."

"So?"

"Turns out she's three sheets to the wind by the time the cops get there. Only a couple of the cabins are rented. One of the rental's to a grandfatherly type and his daughter and they've got a baby with them."

Booth could hear his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

"Woman takes off for the local library. Weird thing to do on vacation, but she's got a USB drive with a letter from her husband's who's off fighting in Afghanistan she says. Grandfather takes off with the baby before 9, maybe 10. The old lady figures he's going to go pick up the woman, go for ice cream, that kind of thing. Still kind of weird, what with the baby and the hour and all, but she practically bathes in Peppermint Schnapps, so she doesn't know the exact departure time."

Booth started to ask a question, but Flynn stopped him.

"Neither came back to the cabin. Lit out. Cops there are a little suspicious, get the old lady's permission the next afternoon to check out the place and they dust it and find fingerprint matches for Dr. Brennan and Max Keenan."

"Where'd you say this was?"

Flynn shook his head slightly. "I didn't. Given who we're dealing with, I don't expect Dr. Brennan or her father to return, but I've got people checking the area."

Despite his even tone, Booth felt anything but calm. "How were they?"

"Old lady says the woman's a health nut, quiet mostly, jogs on the beach. Baby seems good, might be teething. Old lady seems to have a thing for Keenan. Charming guy, that kind of thing."

Flynn stood, and Booth tried to find his own legs which seemed to wobble beneath him.

"I'm telling you as a matter of courtesy, Booth." Flynn opened the door. "I'd like to know how my family was under the circumstances."

oOo

"You know, guys," Angela groaned, "this isn't getting us anywhere."

"You said you interned at the NSA for a summer."

"And you said your family has a history of breaking codes."

New keys for the symbols and they still seemed a million miles from understanding what it meant. The only thing computer-codey about it was the repetition of symbols and the way the whole thing seemed to build on itself, Angela thought.

"We don't have all the pieces yet," Jack said. He shoved his hands into his lab coat and tried looking closer at the Sawyer code. "Maybe we matched the symbols the wrong way."

"You know," Clark said, "it might just be that this means nothing. The guy _was_ locked up in a psychiatric hospital for a reason."

"Don't say that," Jack retorted. "She wouldn't have sent this to us unless she thought we could figure it out."

Angela was beginning to think Ethan Sawyer's true genius lay in his ability to drive them all crazy with his triangle of symbols. She couldn't imagine what Brennan was going through. And Booth.

"Where's she getting these anyway?" Clark was peering just as intently as her husband at the symbols. "Maybe we need to be looking at the same things she's looking at."

"My guess is she's been getting these from Sawyer's published works, ," Jack said. "He's got his own little section at Northwestern, another at MIT and one here at American University."

"So, Dr. Brennan would have to go to each one of those institutions and look up the works, read them, decipher the code and then send it on to us?" Clark started shaking his head. "All while keeping a low profile so that the FBI or local law enforcement types don't arrest her for murder? There's a fair amount of insanity in just thinking about it."

"You know Brennan," Jack was saying, "she's single minded in her pursuit of knowledge."

"I got it," Clark announced. "Ethan Sawyer thinks Pelant is going to make everyone go crazy trying to figure out his next move."

"Not helpful, Clark."

"Neither am I," he admitted. "I've been staring at this on and off for the last three days and it doesn't make any sense to me." He studied the image again. "Maybe it has something to do with the universities."

"We tried that," Angela offered. "Bar codes on his books, Library of Congress cataloging protocols, order of publication, frequency of terms in his writings. . . ."

"You've been very thorough, Miss Montenegro."

"Well, I haven't been able to sleep well," she admitted. "And every time I close my eyes to sleep I see the damned thing."

"See, I am right," said Clark. "It is meant to make us all crazy."

Angela had had enough. With one flick of her index finger, she turned off the monitor.

"Hey!" Hodgins turned toward her. "Why'd you do that, Ange?"

"I need a break from this, Jack." She sighed and felt the weight of disloyalty bearing on her. "I just can't look at that thing anymore." Nothing was working. They'd practically turned that damned code inside out and it only revealed more frustration, more dead ends, more. . . .

"Miss Montenegro?"

Agent Hayes Flynn was walking into her office carrying a small postal service box in an evidence bag. "I believe I've got more of your code."

"The U.S. Postal Service is now delivering keys to diabolical codes?" asked Jack.

"Well, they are trying to be a full service agency," quipped Clark.

Flynn cleared his throat and pulled out the box and opened it. "You'll find several shells in this box with this written on them."

He held up a flat seashell with one of the code symbols written on the inside of it in what looked like marker, and beneath the symbol was its translation.

He placed the box and the shell on her stool. "You've also got a special visitor in Dr. Brennan's office who is insisting on talking to you and to you alone about that code."

With a surge of hope, she raced out of her office toward Brennan's ignoring her husband and Clark and whatever else Flynn was saying. The lights, long dark in Brennan's office, burned brightly and she could not swallow the urge to scream her friend's name when she saw Booth.

And next to him Brennan.

Russ Brennan.


	8. Phase 8

**Phase 8: Paper Locks**

**oOo**

Booth leaned idly against Brennan's desk and kept one eye on the hallway outside his partner's office and another on Russ. Cam had already taken up her spot outside, ready to run interference if they needed it.

He nodded at Russ who had angled Angela's body toward the iguana's tank in the back of the office.

"Dad's got the baby and they're safe, but Tempe's missing," Russ said softly. "Has she contacted you?"

Booth watched Angela's reaction reflected in the glass of the tank.

Nothing except more pain and worry.

"Oh, my God." She turned toward Booth. "Do you think Pelant. . . ?"

He hadn't known what to think when Russ showed up at his office with a box of seashells and a story. He still didn't know what to think, but he was sure he could rip Pelant apart with his bare hands if he hurt Brennan.

"Okay, I gave you your minute." Flynn came charging into the office followed by Cam. "I have some more questions for Dr. Brennan's brother."

"I already know what they are," Russ ground out. "Have you had any contact with your sister lately? Can you think of any place your father might take her and the baby? If you had to guess, where do you think she is? I get regular visits since she got framed for murder. For some reason, the cops think I'm helping my sister."

Russ was playing the put out brother well, thought Booth.

"Okay," said Flynn, "you can start with those if you like."

But Russ knew the score.

"I voluntarily brought in that package from my sister," he continued, "turned it over to the FBI and I'm getting the third degree for my troubles." He shifted his rant. "Shouldn't you be out looking for the guy who really did murder this math genius Tempe knew? My sister wouldn't out and out murder someone. And given all she knows about murder, don't you think she wouldn't be so clumsy about it as to leave clues all over the place?"

Russ' complaints were drawing attention away from Angela who was trying to pull herself together.

"Look, Flynn," Booth stepped in, "wouldn't it make more sense to question the post office clerk?" He tried to shield Angela with his body. "If you want a chance at catching up with Brennan."

Flynn gave him a smug look. "Already done. I have a description of the woman who dropped off the package. Looked to have walked a long ways to mail the package from the look of her. I've updated our description and it's already out to law enforcement agencies within a 200 mile radius." He practically grinned. "I've already got a sighting in the area and it's only a matter of time before we pick her up."

Booth felt himself in the odd position of rooting for Brennan to get away. Praying for it, actually.

Angela shifted behind him. "Then I need to work on the code." The hopeful elation on her face when she had raced in had given way to abject pain and now to a grim determination.

"Great idea," Cam agreed, trying to take command of the situation. "Agent Flynn, we won't waste your time since you think this is a waste of ours.

"Oh, no," he said, "I really would like to see what this thing becomes." Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a paper and unfolded it. "But first, maybe Mr. Brennan would like to share with us what this means."

The photocopy looked to be of the inside flap of a postal service box with the words, "Sunshine Lake," written there.

"I already told you," Russ said, annoyance creeping into his voice, "Tempe was 7, maybe 8, I was 12. Dad and Mom took us to this lake in Minnesota. We nicknamed it Sunshine Lake because it wasn't. Mom and Tempe both got some kind of flu bug, it rained most of the time. When we could go outside, it was cold and damp."

"So why'd she write it on the box?" Flynn held the photocopy out toward Russ. "Is that where she's headed?"

"I doubt it, we all hated that place."

Russ was selling his story well, but Flynn just wasn't buying it.

"I can get you for obstruction."

Russ shrugged his shoulders and looked straight at Flynn. "What do you want me to say? Tempe finished all the books she'd brought, the fishing was lousy," Russ said. "Dad tried to make something out of the whole experience. Taught Tempe and me this tapping code so I could tell her about stuff I saw outside."

"Tapping code?" Angela had brightened considerably. "Morse code?"

"Yeah. I'd tap on the side of the cabin or on the window outside her room."

"That's all very interesting," Flynn said, "but I need to know where this lake is."

"Minnesota," Russ offered. "Land of 10,000 lakes? Hell if I remember where it was. I was 12."

"Angela?" He knew that look. Something in what Russ said had sparked some small flame of hope.

"I think I know what. . .give me 20 minutes." She caught Booth's eye. "Make that 10." And she raced from the room.

oOo

"Booth was right," Sweets said. "For someone who makes $32,000 a year tops, he shouldn't be able to pay back a $120,000 student loan so quickly."

Shaw shuffled through the papers on the table before she found what she was looking for. "According to the records, he paid it back within 6 months."

"He didn't do that on tips," Sweets noted. "Not in this economy."

It was coming together, slowly, painstakingly, but it was coming together. The tight little tapestry that Christopher Pelant had woven together was showing some frayed edges. While certainly not enough to arrest the man, it was enough to give them some hope.

"Booth also said we should look at that bank." Shaw tapped her pen against the table. "We need to follow up on Dr. Brennan's computer," she added. "Miss Montenegro suggested we look for files that are hitchhiking on programs." She looked almost pleased with herself. "I'm learning a great deal by working on this case like this."

Sweets added the bank and the computer to their list. They were little more than a clearinghouse, a couple of people trying to find different angles to use to look at the evidence. While they'd had more misses than hits, something in what they were doing had re-invigorated Booth who had offered several ideas to continue the probe into Pelant's life.

"And Booth pointed out that if Ethan Sawyer left the facility, we should have a video of that, too, especially if he just walked right out of there." He looked through the list of evidence. "Nope, it's not here." _It should be here. _"They monitor the other doors," he added. "We'll have to check those records as well."

It was checking and re-checking, he reminded himself, that sometimes got results. Nothing but good, old-fashioned research.

"Some agents get enough evidence to make their case, get the arrest warrant, and they don't look farther," Shaw said. "Flynn started looking for Dr. Brennan rather than looking at the rest of the evidence."

"Which is why," Sweets said as he added the security tapes to their list, "we needed to revisit the case against Dr. Brennan."

"Yeah," Shaw agreed. "What did Miss Julian say? What was it? Oh, yeah. This case has as many holes as Swiss cheese and stinks twice as bad."

"Isn't Baby Swiss the one with all the tiny holes?" He really didn't care about the answer as he started sifting through another folder of evidence. _We're getting there_, he thought. _We're getting closer. _

oOo

_This has to work,_ she thought as the computer made the final substitutions. _Please be what Sawyers meant._

"I've replaced the last symbols with their word or phrase counterpart," she explained, "and replaced each letter with its Morse Code equivalent."

"How do you go from those symbols to Morse Code?" Flynn asked.

It was a leap, she thought. A leap of faith on Brennan's part that Russ would remember learning Morse Code as a kid and another that she would be able to figure out how it all applied to Sawyer's triangle.

"Brennan told me she thought this would be a computer program," Angela supplied. "But I don't know of any computer that can communicate in symbols like those Ethan Sawyer wrote in or in the translations that Brennan gave us."

"But all computers have a machine language that is a series of zeroes and ones," Hodgins offered. He grinned at her, encouraging her. "The dots in Morse code become the zeroes and the dashes are the ones."

"Let's hope," Angela said.

The computer flashed the original code and Angela placed that on the left hand side. Then the triangle became a river of words, then a sea of dots and dashes, then finally an ocean of zeroes and ones that flooded the computer screen. Even Flynn seemed mesmerized by the streaming code when all of a sudden the computer began to create a third column that began listing filenames and words and when Angela realized what the program was capable of, all she could say was, "Oh, my God!"

oOo

"Can I just say, present company excepted," said Russ, "I don't much like cops."

Booth gave him a slight nod. Truth was, these days at least, he didn't much like cops either.

He could only wonder what Angela's latest brainstorm was since he was effectively banned from that part of the investigation. All he had was time to watch the lazy movements of the iguana in his tank. Each movement seemed to be done methodically, in hyper slow motion—almost as if time were some great long elastic band stretched tight.

"Tell them the truth and they still don't believe you," Russ grumbled. "I remember the lake, but I don't remember which one it was. Dad might remember. I hadn't thought about that place in years. I'm surprised Tempe remembered it."

Booth half-listened to Russ' rant. Something just wasn't adding up.

"Knowing Tempe, maybe I shouldn't be surprised she remembered." Russ looked like he was winding down.

"Why you?"

Russ paused. "Why me?" He looked puzzled.

"Yeah," Booth said. "Why contact you? Every time Bones sends something it just exposes her, gives the FBI a new starting point."

Rus studied his hands then looked up. "Tempe didn't want you to lose her job over this. She couldn't send this to you. Besides, I knew about the lake."

"Yeah, I got that." He'd understood that long ago, even if he didn't like it. But she could have laid low, kept to herself and to the baby and waited until the team had a breakthrough or Pelant had made a mistake. Booth felt he was missing something. "Why Hodgins? Or Cam?" He studied the iguana—slow and steady and very purposeful. Very deliberate.

Just like Bones.

"She could have sent everything straight to the FBI or to the Jeffersonian, but she picked people specifically to send these bits of code. . . ." Suddenly it was making sense. Hodgins and the zoo, Cam and Georgetown, Russ and the lake.

"You're all vulnerable."

"Vulnerable?" Russ stepped closer. "Vulnerable how?"

Before he could explain, they were interrupted by Hodgins sporting a large grin.

"Booth," he said through gasps as if he had been running, "you've just got to see this."

oOo

She'd seen the video a hundred times, practically had each move memorized. But the part that was new and different, _oh, so, sooo beautifully different_, was really easy to overlook unless you knew what to look for.

"The time stamp matches with the time Brennan said she visited Ethan Sawyer, two weeks _before_ his death," she repeated dazed by this new turn. "Brennan wasn't there the night Ethan Sawyer disappeared."

Booth and Russ Brennan had joined them and she didn't mind repeating the information again and again and again until everyone in the Jeffersonian, Washington and the whole United States knew.

"Tempe was there when she said she was," Russ said. "And this proves it?"

"Yes," she said breathlessly. "Absolutely."

She'd been searching for a way to crack open the video and make it reveal its tampering, but she'd been stymied at every turn. That video file had refused to give up its secrets and she had turned to Sawyer's triangle hoping against hope that somehow it could point a finger toward Pelant. And now. . . .

_It was beautiful. Ethan Sawyer had created a key in his tortured, genius brain that, ironically, unlocked a video proving who wasn't his murderer._

"Agent Flynn? What do you think?"

It wasn't Booth who asked, but Cam; Booth was still staring at the video, a mixture of emotions holding him hostage.

"I think this effectively changes the case, Agent Flynn. Don't you?" Cam continued. "Clearly Dr. Brennan wasn't there that night."

"Could Dr. Brennan have taught herself computer code so she could re-write the video?"

Flynn was grasping, she thought. "This is essentially written in machine language," she explained. "Brennan never saw the code and couldn't have known what order the symbols were in."

"It's like he was talking to the computer in its language," offered Hodgins. "It's just brilliant."

Cam wasn't letting go. "Agent Flynn? Don't you agree that this effectively eliminates Dr. Brennan as a viable suspect in Ethan Sawyer's murder?"

The agent, for his part, appeared thoughtful. "Dr. Sweets had our techs re-examine that book Dr. Brennan got from Dr. Sawyer and it is possible, or so they tell me, that the hair in her Prius could have been transferred from it."

"Makes sense," said Hodgins, "humans lose up to 100 hairs daily. Little known factoid."

Angela spared a glance at Russ who was watching Booth. And Booth was carefully watching the screen.

"What exactly does this thing do?"

She pulled herself back to the computer and the program which was still running through the files on the partitioned drive. "I think it identifies alterations made in digitized files and pulls out the changed codes."

"Then what are those?"

Her passwords for the various files and cases on her computer were listed to the right of the stream of computer code. The program had plowed through heavy encryptions and even identified the algorithms used.

And for a second time that day, all she could think to say was "Oh, my God."

oOo

Cam wanted to put an end to this nightmare now, but somehow nothing was as easy as that. They should be able to vacate the arrest warrant, bring Dr. Brennan and the baby home, turn their attentions to the real murderer. Booth should be one limp mess of relief, but instead, he was caught up in that damned computer code and had taken them all with him.

"If this program were unleashed on a government computer, or a bank's," Booth was saying, "what would it do?"

This was well out of her realm of expertise. Angela was staring at the stream of numbers running down the screen, but even thought she wasn't an expert, Cam could see the possibilities adding up just like the list of files and words and numbers next to them.

"Brennan goes to Sawyer to better understand Pelant's thinking. She wants to know what the hell Pelant is thinking." Booth pointed toward the screen. "Sawyer writes this code to show Brennan what Pelant is up to. What Pelant is trying to create."

"A universal key."

Hodgins, his mind constantly swirling with conspiracy theories, put into words what they were all thinking.

It wasn't clear if Flynn had caught up with everyone else in the room, but she didn't care. Booth had this one—he'd been sidelined far too long—and he knew before any of them where this was taking them.

"Okay, Hodgins," Booth was saying, "think. If this universal key is applied to all the computer files on all the government computers, what would happen?"

"No more secrets."

Flynn finally came out of his daze. "Wait a minute. You're telling me that this thing could open up all the government's computer files? Show all the modifications?"

"It's more than that, dude."

"Government files are heavily encrypted." Flynn wasn't going to back down easily, but she had expected no less from the man. "You couldn't even get this thing onto one of those computers. There are firewalls."

Hodgins understood even if the agent didn't. "It could get past the firewalls. It would read the passwords and the encryptions."

She felt a hot knife of dread to her stomach. "If Pelant had this key," she said trying to clarify it all in her mind, "he could get onto government computers, the FBI, the CIA? The military?"

"And he could open all the files." Angela looked ill. "He could read everything."

A glance at Flynn told her he had finally caught up with Booth and the others.

"No more secrets, Agent Flynn," she repeated Hodgins' words.

"If he had this," Hodgins made clear, "Pelant could topple the government."

oOo

**A/N: Thank you kind readers for the alerts and reviews. **


	9. Phase 9

**Phase 9: Paper Locks**

**A/N: Thank you, kind and gentle readers for being here. **

oOo

It was a beautiful terrible thing.

He could practically hear her tell him it was merely the rigorous pursuit of information through research and science, but it really was something else entirely. Ethan Sawyer's maddening maze of symbols really did mean something and somehow, Brennan had figured it out without once seeing the damned thing.

That counted as a miracle in his book.

And if this thing, this program that could unlock secure files was in the hands of someone as twisted as Pelant. . . .

It wasn't his case, not really, but if Flynn wasn't going to make the connection, he damned well was.

"Angela," he said, his voice rough with emotion, "what else can you check against _that?"_

He pointed toward the column of code that the program had pulled from the video.

"If that matches the book codes," Cam finished for him, "we can tie something to Pelant."

"No, guys," Angela countered, "that won't work. But maybe we can see if he altered any. . . give me a moment."

No amount of wishing and hoping and praying had produced results so far, but it didn't stop him from doing all three. He wanted the bastard who had torn his family apart and he desperately wanted Brennan to be fine, to be healthy, to be holed up somewhere until he could get to her.

Flynn, at least, had the good sense to have pulled out his phone as if he was going to call someone, but he wasn't dialing anyone, probably, thought Booth, because he hadn't quite figured out where to start.

Sawyer's program sat idle on the right, a frozen image of Brennan in place, the new time stamp heralding her innocence. Over on the left, Angela was pulling together fragments of what looked like security footage.

"The book codes weren't responsible for altering the time stamp on the security footage," Angela told them. Well beyond the periphery of the investigation, he didn't know what the hell they were talking about.

"Book codes?"

"Those can be tied back to at least half a dozen other individuals who checked out the same books," Flynn said. "Agent Booth doesn't need to be made aware of them."

Flynn was finally back in the game.

"I can run the security footage from the hospital and check that," Angela continued to explain. "Pelant might have erased something and this could pick it out."

The monitor began to show something was happening deep within the computer as images began to flash on the screen and a string of numbers began to appear on their side.

"Flynn?"

Again, he didn't much care if he was interrupting or stepping on the toes of a fellow agent. Pelant had been ahead of them in every way on this case and he wanted to catch the baby-faced psychopath flatfooted.

"Can you get the transaction orders that transferred money from Brennan's account to Caroline Julian's?"

"It was done over the Internet," said Flynn. "It's the only reason Caroline Julian lasted as long as she did." He waved his phone at the monitor. "I should ask you to leave right now."

"Right," Booth stepped toward the other agent, crowding him, punctuating his point. "Put the little psychopath back in his cage. Stop Pelant from destroying lots of lives, Flynn."

For a second, he wondered if Flynn would stand his ground.

"How do you see this playing out, Booth?"

"Toss Pelant back in on violation of his parole. We can limit his use of technology that way."

Flynn weighed his words as he was weighing what to do with the phone in his hand. "You want back in on this?"

"Do what you want on that, Flynn," he said, and he was surprised that he really didn't care if he was involved. "But hold your cards close to the vest on this one. If Pelant had the code he would have used it on July 4th, Independence Day. He likes symbols, making a statement."

"You don't even know if this is what Pelant is working on." Flynn was standing pat. "It's what Ethan Sawyer _said_ Pelant is working on and the only way you got to this is through Dr. Brennan. . . and God knows how she did it. How does anyone go from some cockamamie symbol to that?"

Sawyer's code was now checking each video file, producing a small checklist of files it had already scoured and found unaltered.

He pointed the phone toward Booth. "The least I can do is get the warrant against Dr. Brennan dropped so you can bring her home."

"No."

Booth felt everyone looking at him. He felt the betrayal in that one word and he wished to God that Bones would understand.

"She didn't do it, Booth." Flynn looked confused. "I thought that was the point of today's exercise."

"No." How could he do this to her? "No. Let Pelant think he's winning on this. If he catches wind of us having any kind of proof. . . ." He couldn't finish. He was going to let her dangle out there still and while she would see just how rational it was, she would also have to know it was his idea.

His betrayal.

"If the FBI drops Dr. B as a suspect in Ethan Sawyer's death," Hodgins had taken up the thread, "then Pelant knows we have something on him or we've uncovered how he did it."

"There's got to be a way to connect Pelant to this," Clark said. "Right?"

Booth shook his head. "The parole board is already inclined to believe that the FBI is harassing Pelant." _Because of him._ The guilt was pounding at him. "It has to be concrete. Is there anything, Angela?"

The artist's slight shrug told part of the story. "It needs to run through the videos. It's possible, if. . . it's just going to take some time." She thought for a moment. "If we can access the security system, we might be able to tell more about the programming. . . ."

Booth followed her thinking, but it seemed like it would take too much time. And they needed something now.

"In the meantime, I need to drop the arrest warrant. . . ."

"No," Booth repeated.

He understood all too well what he was doing. If Brennan were on her way to her father, she still had a shot at being safe. Let Pelant think they had something—_anything_—and his defenses would be up. He had other targets; it's what Bones had been telling him in choosing how she communicated. He had a feeling about this, one of those gut feelings that Bones would dismiss, but one he was counting on to keep her safe, to keep them all safe.

"I can take this to Judge Townsend," Flynn was saying. "Maybe get a court order for surveillance on Pelant. Monitor his movements."

"Don't you think Pelant is going to know that he's under surveillance?" Hodgins stepped in. "Hell, he's fooled his ankle monitor and used library books to fake a security tape. The guy manipulates computers."

"Booth is right," Cam added. "Pelant needs to be put behind bars."

Everything had become a balancing act; Booth just wanted to tip things in their favor for once. But their words did nothing to win over Flynn.

But a video snippet did. In it, Ethan Sawyer was leaving the front door of the facility, his image obscured by static, but it looked like he was talking to someone and a disembodied arm from a body just out of view reached out for him.

"That's Pelant?"

As much as they all squinted at the monitor, Pelant's image did not just magically appear at the end of the arm.

Flynn shook his head. "Wishful thinking doesn't make it so."

"But this does." Angela pointed at the screen.

Sawyer's program had pulled a snippet of code and had listed it next to the video.

"What the hell is it doing?" Clark asked.

"Say it's something good, Angela," Cam chimed in.

But Angela said nothing and Booth felt trapped in the silence.

"Angela?" His tone was tinged with desperation.

"This is my case," Flynn began again. "You told me to run it as I see fit and I'd like to keep an eye on this guy. He's not invincible. Sooner or later he'll trip himself up." He finally began to dial a number on his phone. "I can't, in good conscience, hang onto that arrest warrant, either." He put the phone to his ear and turned to leave. Then he paused and turned back to Booth. "Put out the bat signal or whatever it is you need to do to bring her back, Booth. Dr. Brennan's no longer a suspect."

"And you can't be here."

He stood for a moment trying to assess his options, but he knew he only had the one.

He left.

oOo

"Brennan's missing."

There was an oddness about saying the words aloud. She'd been gone for almost three months already, the better part of summer when they two of them should be out and about wheeling their children through the Jeffersonian parks, comparing notes on motherhood, turning up late together to baby group. And it was just so odd to say what they all knew to be true, but had a different kind of meaning now.

"Brennan's missing."

She'd said it to the monitor, but she knew that Jack and Clark were still there. She had held it in while the others were there, while Cam tried to wrangle with Flynn and involve Booth in the case, or look for a way to lock up Pelant, but that argument had only lasted so long and so had her own resolve. Flynn had gone off in one direction and Cam in another and nothing had been resolved except that Brennan was no longer a suspect and Pelant remained outside the arms of the law. She needed someone to be a witness to the insanity of their situation, a witness to the twists and turns that they normally straightened out by now, but had not. Could not.

"Yes, Miss Montenegro," Clark offered, "Dr. Brennan is missing. Has been for some time now. And thanks to your work today, she will be not missing shortly." His voice was tinged with sarcasm. "That's usually how it works."

"Ange?"

Jack understood. She could feel him next to her, but not touching her, not yet, because to do so might make her shatter.

"Russ said that Brennan got separated from her dad and Christine." She took a deep breath. "They don't know where she is."

The words sounded hollow even to her, but she knew they could mean a million different things had happened.

Everything was steeped in irony—the reason for Brennan's flight was gone and now safe from the law, she was missing. The code that had stymied them for weeks had been solved by Brennan without her once seeing it. And it had freed Brennan from being suspect in her friend's death and there was no way to tell her.

"This is Brennan, Ange." Jack was pulling her into his arms, encircling her with hope. "She dug us out of a car buried underground, babe. She knows how to survive."

"I know, but. . . what if. . . ."

That was always their greatest fear in this, to find that Pelant had somehow found Brennan and killed her in one of his horrible, horrible ways.

"She was off the grid, Angela. Her dad's an expert at being a fugitive."

"But she got all this information to us." She drew in a deep breath. "What if he somehow was able to trace it back to her?"

Jack Hodgins, paranoid conspiracy nut that he was, refused to let her dissolve completely in her own paranoia. "He's not superhuman, babe. Brennan was careful. You'll see. Brennan's a survivor."

As Angela melted into his embrace, she tried to believe that was true.

oOo

He had perched himself on the arm of the chair in Brennan's office when Cam found him.

They said nothing—she standing by the desk, her arms folded in front of her, he balanced on the arm, his hands clenched tight.

For several minutes they remained almost as statues. Then it happened. Like a spring, he suddenly stood, uncoiled his body, pounded his fist into the back of the chair with a satisfying thud. The force drove the chair backward and it teetered uncertainly until if fell over with another thud.

"Was it something it said?"

He laughed bitterly, standing over the only thing these days he seemed able to beat.

And he told her. He told her about the Brennans' flight from their safe haven only to become separated and that even Max didn't know where she was. He told her about his theory, that Brennan had delivered her bits of decoded information in symbolic language—Hodgins at the zoo which benefited from Cantilever money; Cam and Georgetown University which Michelle had applied to; Russ and the lake story which tied in with his latest job working on expensive yachts in Florida.

"I'm not crazy, Cam, am I?"

He'd watched, too, as her look of resigned frustration had given way to grim fear.

"He wants to hit us all where we're vulnerable."

That was all she needed to say. They were old lovers, older friends, and their shared experiences had given them a kind of shorthand that he appreciated right now. Plus, she trusted him. Knew him well. Understood that despite everything he wasn't an alarmist, just a man who saw the danger they all were in. Just a man who wanted to protect them but was feeling powerless to do so.

"Seeley, if there's anything I can do. . . ."

"Same here."

Silence crowded the room. For several minutes, they let the weight of all that had happened settle around them. He almost began to think that the big, lazy iguana had it right—move only when you needed to, only when you were hungry. Let others feed you, take care of your needs. Don't bother trying to make a difference because the more you drew attention to yourself, the more people went gunning for you.

"Did I tell you that I got a job offer when we were in Los Angeles? Working security on the movie lot."

It was months ago—another lifetime ago—and he almost wished he had swallowed his distaste for the job and taken it.

"It's sunny there all the time, isn't it, Seeley? No snow, no icy streets."

"Swimming in the ocean every day. Disneyland every night."

"You would have hated it."

"Yeah, maybe." But he hated this, too.

He bent to right the chair and slid it back into position.

"Anything could have happened, Seeley." He'd already concocted his own list of anything and nothing on that list had given him comfort. "From everything that we know, she seemed to be very careful. And Max Keenan evaded the law for years."

Leaning against the back of the chair, he went through his own fears. "That bastard strikes anyone he thinks could expose him. Ezra Craine, Ethan Sawyer, Bones." His voice caught at her nickname. "He's not going to stop killing unless we put him away, Cam. He's controlling the game right now, and Flynn's only giving him another opening. He feels like someone's watching him, he'll strike just because he thinks he can get away with it."

Cam donned a look of grim determination. "I'm not sure exactly how I convince an 18-year-old with a boyfriend to stop using her cell phone and stay off the Internet." She closed her eyes and nodded just slightly before catching his eyes with hers. "We know we can't let him win, Seeley."

He nodded tiredly.

"Go get your little girl, Seeley. Brennan puts tiger moms to shame; she won't be far behind."

It was the Camille Saroyan he loved, feisty and positive as all hell despite everything. He walked over to Cam and pulled her into a hug and held her, kissing her cheek. "You take care of Michelle," he said. "We're not done with Pelant, yet."

oOo

"What part of 'you're a damned fool' don't you understand?"

"Miss Julian," Sweets tried to intervene, "I don't think this is the best approach."

"I don't work for the government anymore. I don't have to be polite."

Sweets took a deep breath and tried to regroup his thoughts. He'd called for this meeting hoping to persuade Agent Flynn on a different course of action, but Flynn's very reasoned, very polite explanation for his choice to pursue watching Pelant had only served to agitate Miss Julian. And as wound up as Caroline Julian was, Sweets observed, Agent Booth was just as calm. He was almost laconic, leaning against the wall, his hands occupied with a pair of dice which he was clicking as he rolled them lazily in his hands.

Agent Flynn only grinned at Caroline Julian's onslaught. "I've already informed the Justice Department that since Dr. Brennan is no longer the prime suspect in Ethan Sawyer's murder, that you should be re-instated." He tapped a folder on his desk. "I think you should be thanking me. I hear they're taking up your case with the bar."

Miss Julian grumbled her thanks, then cocked her head toward Booth as if to encourage him to speak.

But the big man only continued to palm the dice.

The Jeffersonian had made real progress in the last, well, not even 24 hours, thought Sweets, and with a few well-chosen questions, a little more time with Sawyer's program, they might really be getting closer to finding evidence against Pelant. Agent Shaw was trying to track down the delivery driver who had mysteriously paid back a hefty student loan and just as mysteriously disappeared.

Sweets chose to broach the subject again. "I think we're all grateful for your help in getting Miss Julian reinstated." Miss Julian, for her part, was frowning. "It's just that we believe, along with the Jeffersonian team, that the best way to deal with Christopher Pelant is to find some way to show that he violated his parole and should be sent back to prison."

"And according to his parole office, Christopher Pelant makes all his meetings, has a perfect work record and hasn't so much as gotten a library fine." Flynn shook his head. "I don't mean to be impolite, but isn't this as much about the fact that the Jeffersonian couldn't find the evidence against him before as it is you have some notion that he might have been behind this recent trouble with Dr. Brennan?"

Sweets chanced a look at Booth whose hands now remained still.

"Trouble?" Caroline Julian was playing her own version of loud cop, while Booth chose to be the quiet cop. "If he can cause this much trouble wearing an ankle monitor, just think what he's doing walking free." Miss Julian pursed her lips and cocked her head and glared at Flynn. "He's likely to have a convent of nuns looking like they're guilty of whitewashing the White House in front of all the justices of the Supreme Court and you'd still think he's a harmless hacker."

But no matter how impassioned Miss Julian became, Flynn seemed to grow calmer. "We put him under surveillance and I'm sure we'll have something on him." He directed his next comment to Booth. "In three months you couldn't find anything on him except a few maybes, a couple of possibles. It's become personal. He's ruined your near-perfect record."

"You're damned right it's personal," Miss Julian countered. "Some of us may have other talents, but anyway you slice it, people only have one life. And he's messed enough with ours."

"Give us 48 hours," Sweets offered. "Agent Shaw is going to talk to a couple of students who were privy to the conversations between Dr. Sawyer and Pelant during his lecture series. Miss Montenegro has some security footage that looks promising and she has yet to use Sawyer's program on. . . . "

But Flynn held up his hand causing Sweets to pause in his argument.

"I'm sure you've got some promising leads, there, Dr. Sweets. But. . . ."

"You're going to let Pelant know we're onto him."

"I'm putting him under surveillance." Flynn smiled at him. "Generally, that's done without letting the suspect know they're under surveillance."

"Pelant will know." Booth rose to his full height and pocketed the dice before squaring on Flynn. "Pelant will know and you will have lost your advantage."

But Flynn wasn't budging. "What advantage? According to you before, it was dangerous for Dr. Brennan to be arrested. And now, you want to hold onto the warrant for her arrest because to not do so is dangerous. Which is it, Booth?"

Booth held Flynn's gaze and Sweets realized that it would not matter who blinked first.

They'd lost even before they had walked in the door.

"Pelant is going to use this. That's how he operates. You feel safe for a moment, think you've got him, and he's going to kill again."

Flynn gave a slight nod. "Duly noted."

oOo

"Why don't I feel any better?" Caroline asked as they took the turn toward his office.

He had sensed Flynn's intentions the moment they had walked into his office and he knew that nothing would sway him. He slapped Sweets on the shoulder. "Thank you, Sweets."

"For what?" the young man asked. "He didn't listen to me. He didn't listen to any of us."

"Thank you for trying."

"You mean that?" A touch of sincerity had caused Sweets to stop steps from the office. "You really mean that?"

"Yeah," he said over his shoulder as he stepped into his own office.

"You going to go pick up your little Booth?" Caroline had stepped right into the office with him. "Take a few days and see if you can bloodhound your partner?"

"Just waiting on a call from Max." He'd spent a sleepless night, one of many since this began, waiting for word on his family. The folders on his desk were ready to pass on to other agents—he was going to do his own disappearing act for a while.

"There's still the delivery man," Sweets offered. "Pelant could have just as easily pulled some of his computer magic to pay off the guy's loans as he did to transfer money from Dr. Brennan's account to Miss Julian's."

His gut was practically screaming on this one. "He's gone missing?"

"Shaw's tracking him down, now."

Caroline's grimace told him he was probably right. "My bet is that he's already dead." Booth hated the hunch, but the odds were in his favor on this one.

"No. Really?"

He was almost touched by the young man's naïveté. "The moment Pelant knew that the FBI had withdrawn the murder warrant on Bones, the delivery man was dead."

"I'm with Booth on this one, cher."

Sweets stood there, halfway between incredulous and resigned. "You can't know that."

Booth understood how Sweets felt. "It's not over, Sweets," he said, his decision on a course of action already made. He picked up the folders on his desk. "It's not over. Not by a long shot."


	10. Phase 10

**Phase 10: Paper Locks**

**A/N: Ahh, yes. Another in a regularly irregular submission. Thank you, kind readers, for the reviews and the alerts. **

oOo

Russ did that thing, that little thing that Bones did when she was thinking, when her mind was going a million miles per hour, and Booth was having a hard time looking in his direction.

"Dad's still not sure this is the right thing to do."

Booth glanced at Russ Brennan and tried not to see his sister in his expression, but it was hard. Damned hard.

Two hundred miles from Washington, D.C. and he should be used to the man sitting next to him, twelve weeks since he'd seen Brennan or Christine, and he should be used to all the changes in his life, but he wasn't used to a damned thing. He'd cultivated the patience necessary for a sniper, but no matter how fast Russ was pushing his truck along the highway, it just wasn't going fast enough, but a damned sight too fast.

He was the boy impatient for Christmas yet afraid of what he was going to find under the tree.

"You're sure Amy and the girls are fine?"

It was always easier to change the subject, find the semi-solid ground rather than the quicksand of talking about Max Keenan.

"My in-laws have loved having the girls and Amy for the summer." Russ glanced his way. "They even love me, believe it or not."

"They have to love me, I guess," he added in a self-deprecating tone, "given how sick Haley can get. They figure I'm a keeper if I stick around."

If he hadn't been Brennan's brother, his devotion to his adopted daughters alone would have earned Booth's respect. "But she's doing good now, right?"

Russ grinned. "Better than all right." He signaled, then eased the truck into the right lane. "She's a tough one, Haley. She might outlive us all."

Booth watched as the traffic on their left began to zoom past them as Russ made the slower turn off the exit ramp and pointed the truck toward the small resort town which had been the last place in which the Brennan family fugitives had been together.

It wasn't fair, Booth thought. Children should be allowed to be children, not deal with something as horrible as cystic fibrosis. But he'd seen too much, experienced too much to hold out much hope for that.

"Dad said the second car would have been parked about 5, 6 miles in that direction," Russ said pointing to his left. "She would have had some money with her, and if she got to the car, he said she would have enough traveling money for a week or so."

The snippets of information he'd gleaned over the last 24 hours through Russ' conversation with Max had been enough to tell him just how thorough the old con had been at concealing the three of them and making sure they had a couple of escape routes at each of their hiding spots.

"You think talking to the police here will really help?"

Booth really wasn't sure of anything at this point. But they needed a starting point to track Brennan and this was their best choice. "I want to know if they picked up someone matching her description." He sighed. Paranoia was Hodgin's territory and it was wearing him down. "There's nothing on the wires, but those could have been altered."

"You really think this Pelant guy can doctor stuff all the way from Washington?" Russ grimaced and again Booth was reminded of his partner. "Dad might be right. Maybe Tempe and the baby should stay hidden."

Nothing seemed certain except one thing when it came to Pelant. "He's capable of doing a lot of damage," Booth agreed. "And I don't think he's done with us."

oOo

She listened as Jack finished another in a long list of what seemed to be interminable calls to this person and that, all in the name of maintaining and keeping the Cantilever accounts safe.

Standing in the doorway of his study, she tried her best to don a teasing tone despite the seriousness of the situation. "You do know, don't you, that I told Cam we would be an hour late more than two hours ago?"

The _Mighty Flynn_ as she was wont to think of him these days, had turned over Sawyer's code to the FBI computer experts for analysis and despite practically turning her computer inside out, she'd been unable to do more with the video of Ethan Sawyer than prove he had left the psychiatric facility little more than an hour before his death. As much as she would love to nail Pelant just out of principle for the damage he'd already inflicted on her friends, she wasn't sure what else she could do.

"I just have one more call to make, Ange."

Sighing, she retreated to the living room where Michael was deeply engrossed in trying to dismantle the walker she had paid some teenager at the toy store to assemble. "Daddy's still on the phone, Michael." She plopped down on the sofa to watch her son. "So we just cool our jets, kiddo."

Michael, oblivious to the crisis around him, succeeded in pulling the small red block from its nest in the walker and began pounding it against the side before tossing it in a sideways motion, then trying to reach for it. But the design of the walker and the length of the toss and subsequent roll put the block effectively out of reach and he sent up a wail.

To his protest, she only had one thing to say: "It's okay kid. I feel the same way."

"Angela?"

She turned to see Jack framed in the doorway. Despite his reassurances, he had the careworn face of a man at war with an enemy who could strike at any time. But that look passed quickly as he donned the other look—the one she knew he did purposefully to reassure her and to hide his anxiety from their son.

"Maybe we should just call Cam and tell her we won't be in at all." Angela reached for the red block and handed it to Michael who began to beat it against the walker. "Flynn froze me out of working on Sawyer's case until his FBI computer guys verify my findings. Maybe they'll have a better crack at it."

She'd protested, Cam protested more, but Flynn won and effectively curtailed any chance she had at seeing all the tricks Sawyer's code could do at least for a while.

"He's just verifying the program, Ange." Jack was trying to distract Michael from his noisy routine by trying to entice him with the purple rabbit. "Overthrowing the government kind of got his attention."

"How'd you like it if they sent your bug IDs out to be verified?"

It was a cold thing to say to her husband who had practically rocked her to sleep last night and she winced at her tone. But Jack, like he did so often these days, only smiled and tried to deflect her mood. "Cam said you'd probably have full access to everything by this afternoon, Ange. Besides," he added as he kissed her cheek, "you can spend more time with Michael and the two of you can help me water my plants."

He bent to Michael and pulled him up from the walker and into his arms. "You want to help Daddy, don't you, Michael?"

He could have been asking his son if he wanted to crawl through buckets of slime, but with that tone, Jack had a way of making Michael giggle.

"So, is the Cantilever group still solvent?"

He nodded as he rubbed Michael's belly, listing a number of security measures that seemed straight out of some spy thriller.

"It does sound a little like James Bond with all the triple confirmations and secret passcodes, babe."

"We can never be too careful, can we, Michael?"

He might have been directing his comment to his son, but she knew he was trying to make light of the whole situation that had had both of them on edge.

"The Cantilever group does a lot of good work," she acknowledged. "They help sign my paycheck every week. Keeps Michael here in diapers. Who knew we could have gotten in free at the zoo?" She, too, could play the game of trying to lighten the mood. "Does the Cantilever Group own any salons? I could go for a full day of self-indulgence."

Jack was swaying with Michael. "If Pelant succeeded in freezing the assets of the Cantilever Group, he could shut down the Jeffersonian."

The thought had crossed both their minds in the last several weeks. Jack had been on top of the threat to his family's fortune ever since Brennan had been framed for murder. Last night's and this morning's flurry of phone calls had been his way of ensuring the continued flow of funds for dozens of charities and scientific institutions.

"Did you know, Michael," he was saying, "that if we don't go into work today, they'll have to shut down the Jeffersonian?"

She gave him a look of protest. "Okay, I'll get Michael's things," she said as she made her way to the baby's room. She was growing tired, so damned tired, of the Mighty Flynn calling the shots. That and the new worry about Brennan had left her feeling limp like an old rag doll. "But maybe the Jeffersonian could do without us for the day," she called out half-heartedly.

"Never," he said as he continued to sway with his son. "Never."

oOo

"Anything?"

Agent Ginny Shaw had that squinty-eyed look of someone too long in front of the computer.

And a look of defeat.

"I've called everyone, even sent a couple of officers around to check and nothing. Nada. Zilch." She practically sagged into her chair.

Sweets studied the young woman. She was efficient and tenacious and more than a little possessed with this case—_and maybe Agent Booth_—and it was generally all those attributes—_minus her obsession with Agent Booth_—that had helped propel the investigation forward. Losing contact with the delivery man was a setback, but they were making some real progress on other fronts. Wasn't it just last night that the Jeffersonian found proof that the security tape at the psychiatric hospital had been doctored?

"We're not just spinning our wheels here," he started to say, partly to re-invigorate the investigation. "You've got the interviews with those students on the talks between Pelant and Sawyer and. . . ."

"I'm off the case."

Sweets did a mental U-turn. "What? We're making progress, here." They were even though they were just baby steps. "Why?"

Shaw sighed, shook her head and looked absolutely miserable. "You'll have to ask Agent Flynn."

oOo

Booth laid the photograph Angela had created for him on the counter as the sheriff sipped his coffee. From Max's description, this was how Brennan looked the last time he'd seen his daughter—blonde, tanned, thinner, her eyes an eerie green rather than her familiar blue. It was hard to look up from the face he found so familiar even in this different guise, but he did to gauge the sheriff's reaction.

"Sure, I know the woman." The big sheriff pointed toward the blonde Brennan. "Temperance Brennan. The author."

"So you saw her?" asked Russ.

"Nope," said the sheriff. "But she matches the description Franny gave of that woman staying at her cabin with her dad and the baby. Blonde, good looking." The man shrugged. "I didn't get my training at the Bureau, but I can do the math." He reached behind him to a computer printer and laid a printout over the photo. "I put out a query on the old man and the woman because of a drug bust and got back an FBI bulletin that the woman was wanted for a murder. Got a couple of phone calls, too, from an Agent Flynn." He tapped on the printout with his finger. "This morning, this comes over the wires."

The printout header marked it as originating from the FBI.

"Dropped the warrant on her." The sheriff shifted his weight and eyed both Booth and Russ. "So, she's not wanted anymore by the FBI, but you want her." He played his fingers lightly over the printout. "Which makes you family or friends, Agent Booth."

Russ shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and hesitated. "She's my sister," he said.

The sheriff nodded and then glanced toward Booth. "You're Andy Lister."

"He's just Booth," Russ corrected.

"Your kid?"

Booth nodded.

The sheriff smiled sympathetically and cocked his head, beckoning them to follow him to a small seating area in the office.

Booth took the cup of coffee the big man offered and perched himself on the edge of the chair. Russ positioned himself in the farthest seat from the sheriff.

"I like her books," the sheriff was saying as he pulled out a small folder from a stack on the table, "and thought it a shame she'd decided to try her hand at actually committing a murder rather than solving them. Glad I was wrong."

"Is there anyone we could talk to? Anyone she might have talked to here in town?" Booth asked.

The sheriff shook his head. "Didn't talk to hardly anyone in town. Asked the librarian about computer use, but beyond that, nothing. Came into the library, did her business, left. Only came in there twice and only wanted to use the computer, didn't even use the Internet. Her father did most of the grocery shopping. Didn't do much more than just chat up the ladies."

Booth sat back and marked off the library as a place to look for clues. "What about this Franny? Did you talk to her?"

"Of course," said the sheriff as he opened the folder in his hands. "Brought her in, sobered her up, questioned her. Sent deputies out to the cabin to dust it for prints and collect evidence." He pulled a paper from the folder. "Gave everything over to the FBI. They sent an agent down here." He pointed to a line on the paper. "Agent Megan Dawes. Efficient one, that one." He turned the paper over to Booth. "That's the inventory of the cabin. Mostly food, baby items. Nothing much to point to a direction."

"Sorry. Franny didn't have any idea what direction the old man went. I kind of figured he circled back and picked up your girl here in town and then hightailed it."

Booth tried to consider their options. This, too, seemed a dead end. Maybe they would be better off meeting up with Max? Bones had few options but to go to her father. He'd been through her computer, her address book, looking for names of anyone who might shelter her between here and her father's present location. But nothing. _Where the hell was she?_ he kept asking himself.

"There was a car," Russ offered. "A 1992 Ford Taurus. Hunter green." He described the area where Max and Brennan had hid the car.

The sheriff made a sound that was a cross between a hiss and a cough. "Damn." He pulled himself up from the chair and waved them to follow him. "I might know your car. But she didn't leave town in that car."

oOo

Cam breathed in deeply and exhaled just as deeply hoping that she could tough this out. As a federal coroner she had seen her share of horrors and as head of the Medico Legal Lab at the Jeffersonian she had seen the worst of humanity, or at least, what was left of humanity once someone had finished filleting, frappeing and fricasseeing another human being.

But this was a horror of a different kind.

She'd spent the morning arguing, on the verge of threatening, but if she had wanted any semblance of keeping the Jeffersonian lab operating, of keeping her job, of having any chance at stopping Pelant, she had had to give in.

"So. . . I'm what, fired?"

Dr. Clark Edison was standing over the bones of a WWI soldier in the bone room and looking as depressed as if the man on the table were a relative.

"No, no, Dr. Edison," she said quickly trying to correct her mistake. "No, the Jeffersonian board would like me to hire you. Full time. In forensic anthropology."

Saying it fast had not made it sound convincing.

But Clark was practically beaming. "Well, I'm touched, Dr. Saroyan. I'd be honored to work here full time with all of you."

"No, I. . . ."

"I'm not hired?"

She drew in another huge breath and tried to expel all the demons that seemed to be tormenting her and making this more impossible now than it had seemed only an hour ago.

"No, they want to hire you. _I want to hire you_." She wanted to believe that yoga breathing was going to make this easier but she had already botched it up. "They want you to be the forensic anthropologist who works with the FBI liaison, Dr. Edison."

For a moment, it seemed as if neither one of them was breathing.

"What about Dr. Brennan?" he asked. "I thought that given the fact that we proved she didn't do it that she'd be back here and working in this lab like she had before." He looked confused. "I mean when she finally decides to come out of hiding."

Here's where it got messy, thought Cam. "The FBI has been in contact with the board and it was decided that Dr. Brennan's services with the FBI would no longer be required since. . . ."

She couldn't finish. The knot of anxiety in her stomach had made its way up to her throat.

But Clark could finish. "Her services are no longer required since she ran." He shook his head. "They figure she doesn't respect the law, then she might compromise future cases by ignoring it altogether."

It had been the battle she'd fought for over an hour, pointing out the woman's legendary objectivity and professionalism and citing dozens of examples of how the woman had served the FBI and other government agencies and at the end of each of the skirmishes in which she had gained some valuable ground, she still had lost the war.

And she felt badly for Clark who was now caught in the middle.

"You are a fine scientist, Dr. Edison. You are responsible for assisting in solving dozens of cases and your work over the last 3 months has been exemplarity. I don't know how we would have gotten along without you."

"And under different circumstances, you would be my first choice as a replacement for Dr. Brennan.

"But we both know that I'm not Dr. Brennan."

That had been the crux of her argument, the main battle that morning, but she had lost that battle as soundly as she had lost all the others. It wasn't that she didn't like Clark—she did. But he didn't have the credentials, he didn't have the qualities that Dr. Brennan had.

No one did.

"So the Jeffersonian board wants me to work with the FBI so that I can be the one kidnapped, shot, shot at, stabbed, beaten and buried alive," he said, "oh, and be accused of murder because of some rampaging lunatic psychopath serial killer who wants me dead? Did I get it all?"

He delivered his question with that incredulous tone he'd sometimes take when dealing with the weirdness of the lab.

"I think you forgot being blown up."

He smiled. He might have been a man of short stature, but he never really stood taller in her eyes than he did then.

She returned his smile.

"Dr. Saroyan," he said as he turned back to the bones on the lab table, "would you please inform the board that I am honored by their offer, and that I am thinking it over."

"Are you?"

"For now." He paused and seemed to be considering something. "I have learned it's best to take some time to consider life altering decisions. Besides," he added, "would you rather than I tell them I would be honored to be kidnapped, shot, shot at, stabbed, beaten and buried alive in my work with the FBI?"

"You forgot the part about being blown up and being accused of murder."

They shared a look, the look that long-time colleagues share when they know the system around them is tragically flawed and yet, they understand their place in that system.

"Dr. Saroyan?" Dr. Edison straightened. "I am honored by the offer, but I think I would be more honored to work alongside Dr. Brennan as I have in the past."

"Dr. Brennan may not want the job when she returns," Cam said, not sure if her words were a lie or not. She wasn't even sure if she would return. Of course, missing did not mean dead, but given everything that Pelant had been able to do to disrupt the lab and the lives of her friends, she really had no idea what to think. She feared that at any moment, the body of her friend would be brought into the lab, another victim of the madman who was Pelant and she really wondered if anyone would be able to stop him then.

"If Dr. Brennan wants to stick to research, I really wouldn't blame her," Dr. Edison offered. "These bones," he said, point to the body laid out on the table, "aren't likely to have someone lurking in the shadows ready to pop out and eviscerate the scientist who is just trying to determine cause of death or make an identification."

Cam studied the man in front of her for a moment. "You, Dr. Edison, are truly a gentleman. And I won't forget this."

He gave her a lopsided smile and a nod. "By the way, Dr. Saroyan, is there a reason why the board is just now acting on this? It seems to me that they could have done this months ago when this whole brouhaha began."

She sighed.

"I take that as a yes."

"The current FBI liaison requested it," she said. No matter how fast or slow she said something, she was discovering, it didn't make the discomfort in saying it any less.

"So it was Agent Flynn who said he could not work with Dr. Brennan," Clark said as he turned back to the bones. "Interesting."

"Yes," Cam said as she watched him work, "interesting."


	11. Phase 11

**Phase 11: Paper Locks**

**Enjoy!**

oOo

To Dr. Lance Sweets, the conference room at the Hoover always seemed large and open, only becoming an intimate space when he or Booth or the two of them were interviewing someone and the emotions of loss seemed to fill the space.

But today, the place was crowded, not with anyone's pent-up emotions but his own.

Special Agent Hayes Flynn sat at the table, a small stack of folders in front of him, his hands folded on top. His face was impassive—the great stone face—Angela had slipped in calling him.

"I just don't understand," Sweets finished, willing his voice to an even tone, "I thought that you wanted Agent Shaw and myself to get at the truth. We've got a couple of promising leads. The interviews Agent Shaw conducted with the students alone have a great deal of significance for the case."

Flynn said nothing for a moment and Sweets wondered if the man had even been listening to him for the past 10 minutes. He'd laid out everything that they had done, everything that they had planned to do, and while it didn't seem that their progress was as significant as unlocking Sawyer's code and proving that the security time stamp had been faked, he knew that they needed a bit more time to gather evidence.

"Is that everything, Dr. Sweets?" Flynn finally said.

He managed a weak, "Yes," to the infuriating calm that was Flynn.

"I would have to say," Flynn began, "that your work here is exceptional. I think you've done a fine job given the situation."

Sweets waited.

And waited.

Finally, he had had enough. "Is that all?"

Flynn looked confused. "I thought you and Agent Shaw were instrumental in meeting your goal—to clear Dr. Brennan's name."

Sweets drew in a breath and wondered if the man had really heard him. "We were seeking the truth about Ethan Sawyer's death."

He waited.

"And we believe that the delivery man was instrumental in assisting Pelant."

He waited.

"His name is Derek Sims and we're trying to locate him."

Fine, he thought. Two can play this game. He waited.

But it seemed that Flynn was far better at patience than he was.

"Look," he said, his resolve cracking, "I need some reason why Agent Shaw was removed from this case. I thought we were trying to catch a murderer here."

Flynn gave him that slow, assessing look that he was growing to hate. He should have been used to it with Dr. Brennan—in fact, he had cultivated his own coping strategies for it with her—but with Flynn, he needed a whole new set.

"Dr. Sweets," Flynn began, slowly and deliberately, "Given the new direction of the investigation, I thought it best to suspend some aspects of the investigation so that we don't tip off Pelant."

"I don't understand," he said.

Flynn gave him that look again. "Given the threat that Pelant could pose, it was decided to focus on surveillance and prevention rather than the murder investigation."

"I still don't understand," Sweets repeated. "He killed at least three people."

To that, Flynn sighed and placed his hands flat on the folders. "At least two FBI profilers agree that Pelant's goal was to cripple the Jeffersonian team and to eliminate anyone he thought could threaten his primary goal. To that end, I've turned over the evidence we have on the code that Dr. Sawyer had worked on to the cyber crimes division."

"What?" Sweets did not consider himself a stupid man, but little Flynn was saying made sense to him. "Are you saying that. . . the focus in the Pelant case is on a potential cyber crime?"

Flynn gave a slight nod. "We've already created a dummy web site, really a mirror site, and have Pelant under surveillance. More than that, I'm not really at liberty to say."

Sweets sat back in his chair stunned.

"I have noted how helpful you and the entire Jeffersonian team has been at alerting us to this potential danger." Flynn underscored his point by tapping the top folder. "I also have to thank you, personally, Dr. Sweets."

"Personally?" Sweets wasn't sure what he had done to be thanked for. Everything had become almost surreal.

"Your efficiency report on the Jeffersonian on my interaction with the team there," Flynn cocked his head, "it was instrumental in helping make possible my move to the position as permanent FBI liaison."

Sweets, who prided himself on being able to read people, understand their motivations, anticipate human behavior, really hadn't seen this coming.

"I'd like you to continue to provide profiling for the team."

"What. . . what about Booth?" Sweets choked out. "I assumed, I think we all assumed, that once Dr. Brennan's name was cleared, that Agent Booth would return as the FBI liaison."

This was the great stone face that Angela had been talking about. Flynn showed no outward emotion, no sense that Sweets' words might have affected him. Sweets thought he would hate to play poker with the man.

"By running as she did," Flynn explained, "Dr. Brennan hurt herself with the Bureau and hurt Agent Booth by association."

"Agent Booth cooperated fully," Sweets reminded him. "He had no knowledge that Dr. Brennan was going to run and given what happened. . . ." But he stopped knowing it was a losing battle. He decided to regroup. "Does Dr. Saroyan know?"

Flynn smiled slightly. "You've been a tremendous asset to the team, Dr. Sweets. I'd hate to lose your services."

oOo

"As promised," said the sheriff as he met them at the end of the gravel driveway, "home of the two lunk heads who might have your vehicle."

Booth alit from the truck and looked up the long driveway toward the garage, a jerry-rigged structure of rusted metal panels that looked like a strong wind might take it down. The weather-worn house, just a few feet to the west, didn't look much better.

Russ drew up beside him. "Chop shop?"

The sheriff grunted. "Among other things. Mostly these days, Tim and Tom, the Ryan brothers, they scrounge around for metal bits and pieces they can weld together and take up north to sell at flea markets and the like. You know, those lawn ornaments made out of old shovels and rakes and old copper floats?"

"So you think they were out looking for parts when they came upon the car?"

The sheriff shrugged one shoulder and waved them over to the sparse grass of the front yard. "Saw Tim the other day driving a green Taurus. Linda Mae Watkins at the resale shop mentioned something about how he'd brought in some things for sale. Odd things for him. Didn't think much of it at the time since people here are always doing that kind of thing." He nodded toward the garage. "Not too many jobs around here, so people got to do what they can to keep body and soul together."

"Let me guess," Booth said, "women's and baby's clothing."

"That would be my guess." He looked toward Russ. "Probably your father's clothes didn't fit them. My guess is they threw those in as well."

He motioned for them to follow him on the lawn rather than the gravel of the driveway. "Don't need to announce ourselves," he whispered. "Gravel noise wakes up the dog, the dog wakes them up. No telling it they're feeling guilty about what they done or not."

Booth felt for his gun and stole a glance at the sheriff's own hands. He hadn't unsnapped the restraining strap from the holster at his side, but he did brush his hand against the gun as he made his way up the slight hill. Russ trailed them several steps behind.

It happened suddenly as these things sometimes do. One man, in a ragged T-shirt to match his ragged appearance walked out of the house scratching his belly, the screen door banging behind him before he realized he had company. With one look in their direction, he screamed out, "Tim!" and made a dash toward the garage. Booth raced after him, catching him at the side of the garage and sending them both tumbling to the gravel. Booth held on, despite the man's flailing and wrestled them both to their feet while holding onto the back of the man's shirt.

The sheriff had managed the second Ryan with his gun, holding it steady on the man. "This here is an official visit, Timmy. Here to talk to you and your brother about some missing items." He motioned with his gun, directing the brother toward the garage. Russ had already given both brothers a wide berth, but at Booth's signal, made his way to the garage.

"It's here, Booth."

He stood just outside the garage, restraining his prisoner, and from the angle Booth couldn't see inside, but he could hear the decidedly unfriendly growl of a dog.

"You sure?" he asked Russ.

"The plates match." He squatted down and cocked his head to the right. "Dad said it had three scratches on the right rear bumper. Gouges really. They're here."

Russ straightened and took a couple steps backwards. "There's also a dog here. He's chained, but. . . ."

"That's our car," spat out the Ryan being held by the sheriff. "We've had it for months."

"You stole it," Booth corrected him.

The sheriff kept his gun pointed at his prisoner. "This liar is Tim Ryan, the younger. That's Tom Ryan." He pointed at Booth. "Special Agent Booth is from Washington. And that's his associate. And this is official business, boys. Best you cooperate."

"Tom?" Booth tightened his grip on the man he held. "There was a woman. What happened to the woman you got this car from?"

"Woman?" The man was trying to twist out of Booth's grip on his shirt. "Didn't see no woman."

"How'd you get the car?" the sheriff asked Tim.

"Told you, we had it for months."

Russ disappeared into the garage, the growls of the dog growing ominous, then erupting into full-scale barking.

"Shut him up, Timmy," ordered the sheriff.

"Why should I?" asked the man. "You're the ones trespassing."

The barks abruptly stopped.

"The woman," Booth repeated. "Concentrate on what I'm asking. Tell me about the woman."

"What woman?" Tom protested. "There was no woman."

Russ emerged from the garage, the gravel of the driveway crunching beneath his feet. In one hand he held the leash of the dog, a mixed breed of neglect and abuse, and in the other a roll of money. "Found this where Dad said it would be."

"That's ours," screamed Tim. "That's our money. We keep it in the car."

"Dumbass place to keep it if any old stranger can just walk up and get at it," said the sheriff. "What you do? Leave it on the front seat?"

"The woman who was with this car. What happened to her?" Booth drew Tom's face close to his own. "I swear if you don't tell me what happened to her. . . ."

"There was no woman," Tom insisted. Booth could see the beads of sweat on the man's face, the fear in his eyes. "Didn't see no woman."

"Then how the hell did you get this car?"

"You Ryan boys better start talking," the sheriff commanded. "I'll get you for the local stuff, car theft, trafficking in stolen merchandise, but kidnapping, that's federal and he's FBI."

Tom Ryan stopped fighting against Booth. "Kidnapping?"

"We didn't kidnap no woman," Tim argued.

"The woman," Booth repeated, his look and voice as fierce as he felt. "I want to know what happened to the woman."

"There wasn't any woman," Tom insisted, desperate. "We found the car. Over at Percy's pasture."

"You found it?"

"We were looking for stuff, you know, to sell." Tom drew up a hand to wipe the sweat from his face. "We found it. Later we heard about that writer lady staying at Mark's aunt's place. You know, the one who was wanted for murder and figured it was hers or something. Didn't think she'd be back for it."

"When?" Booth demanded. "_When_ did you find this car?"

No great mental calculations were necessary to piece together the timeline from the answer. They'd stolen the car days before the drug bust which had sent Max and Brennan scurrying from their beach-side hideaway.

The sheriff kicked at the younger brother who had sunk to the ground at his brother's confession. "We sold some of the stuff we found in the car." He looked at Booth. "We didn't get near but $23 for everything. You can have it. And the car."

Booth closed his eyes and tried to focus. When he opened them, he drew Tom's face even closer to his. "I need to know. Did you see the woman? On the road? Around the town? She'd be 5'8", mid-30s, good looking. You drive around the countryside looking for stuff; did you see her?"

He pulled the photo of Brennan from his pocket with one hand and shoved it in Tom's face. "This woman. Have you seen her?"

He didn't need Sweets to tell him the man was telling the truth when he told him no this time. Booth released the man and felt the knot of worry that had been there since this began tighten in his chest.

"You?" The sheriff kicked at the younger man. "You see anyone fitting that description?"

Tim shook his head no and for good measure pointed out that thieves generally tried to avoid people who might be witnesses to their crime. Then he asked Russ if there was any more money to be found in the car.

The sheriff gave him another kick for good measure.

"So," Russ said as he came up beside Booth, the leashed dog panting at his side, "what do we do now? Do we keep looking in this area?"

Russ looked about as lost as he felt.

"No," he said after some time. He silently asked Bones to forgive him. "Call Max and tell him we're coming." He carefully pocketed the photo. "Tell him we're coming to take Christine home."

oOo

"Do we have any idea how the victim died?"

Cam smiled inwardly as Agent Flynn shifted from the position he'd taken to one decidedly no better than the one he'd recently vacated. She'd taken her own place, slightly more upwind of the van so that she could manage the ebb and flow of technicians gathering evidence.

Booth, had he been here, would have complained and cringed at the smells emanating from the rotting corpse and the rotting food in the van, but Flynn was trying to brave it all, every whiff of putrefying flesh and moldering vegetable and meat.

"We don't have cause of death, Agent Flynn," she offered as another technician's exit from the vehicle necessitated that the agent step directly in front of the back doors of the van. The impassive look, the one she had such difficulty interpreting at times, cracked at the overwhelming stench of decomposition and she wondered if he'd add to the array of odors by vomiting.

Instead, he blanched and stepped to the side—her side—stealing some of the fresh air she'd found on this end of the open doors.

"He's mostly soup at this point," offered Dr. Hodgins as he emerged from the van, doffing the oxygen mask as he did so. "But I'd estimate he's been in there at least 5 days. With the heat and the locked vehicle," he added, as Dr. Edison climbed down from the van, "it was essentially an oven in there liquefying the remains."

Flynn only grunted his understanding as he took notes.

Dr. Edison removed his oxygen mask. "The deceased is male, in his early twenties." He nodded toward the van. "Beyond that, I can't give you anything else because it's hard to tell where the rotting vegetables start and he ends."

Booth would have deflected the horror of the situation with a quip, or made a big sweeping gesture as he called for everything to be brought back to the Jeffersonian.

But instead, they had Flynn.

He was fairly humorless, harder to decipher than some of Hodgins' mass spectrometer results, thought Cam, and he just wasn't Booth.

Dr. Edison, a regular now at these scenes in his Jeffersonian jumpsuit, was a good fit even if he wasn't Dr. Brennan. He offered up his own set of quirks, worked well with the interns, and he was one of them. He came much slower to conclusions than did Dr. Brennan, but he was a good man, one she could respect.

And this was the hand she was dealt.

"Would you arrange transport to the Jeffersonian?" She almost wanted to laugh as a tech, wearing protective breathing gear, jostled Flynn and the agent made a face of pain as he was once again directly in the line of foul air. "Once Dr. Edison gets the body back to the Jeffersonian, we can start work on an ID."

She watched, tamping down her amusement, as Flynn gave her a curt nod and looked almost grateful for her request as he turned from the crime scene.

"I bet he won't eat soup for at least a week after seeing this," Dr. Edison said when the agent was well out of earshot.

"A month," Hodgins countered. "And definitely no stews on the menu."

She fought back a smile at the exchange—it was an us vs. them kind of relationship with the FBI now, but she could manage that as well.

The FBI had their secrets, and so did they.

oOo

There was the law and then there was life.

She was reminded of this in the back of a truck, wedged between crates of melons, feeling every imperfection of the road in her bones, wondering how long the family she'd found herself with had been illegally in the U.S., then deciding it did not matter.

There was the law and there was life.

The 8-year-old, his battered baseball cap shading his eyes from the afternoon sunlight, his sister, just 6, bouncing with the movement of the truck, the tattered doll in her arms lovingly cradled—they might have a better life here than there, wherever home was in Mexico.

It all came back to love.

Love was that inexplicable force drawing her like a magnet to her daughter and to her father, made her endure the bone jarring (and flesh bruising) ride in the back of the truck where the breeze coming in through the slats of wood was a scant relief from the heat. The road behind couldn't recede fast enough on her way back to her baby and to her father.

Back to the safety of them.

That Booth had once insisted that love was the glue that held the universe together was just another in a whole litany of disagreements they had had over the years about love. She seriously wondered if the heat or the unending tousling of the truck's movements was warping the mental discipline that she tried to maintain. She dared not think of Booth.

She shifted the 6-year-old at her side and positioned her so that she could catch more of the truck-generated breeze and take advantage of the shade supplied by the tarp they'd stretched between the crates.

The little girl awoke briefly, murmured something, then fell back again into a heat-driven drowse.

She, too, closed her eyes and wondered if any of the symbols she'd sent along to the Jeffersonian had been of any use. Weeks of carefully moving from one university to the next had given her something to do, something to research. Max had hated the idea, argued against it, saw it only as a way to expose herself, endanger them all, but she'd been careful.

Oh, so careful. So very, very careful.

And where had it gotten her?

On the back bed of an old truck, traveling country roads, headed north with a dwindling supply of money and not much more than the clothes on her back.

She swiped at a trickle of sweat tickling the side of her face. If nothing else, it had been a small tribute to Ethan to read his papers and try to understand his work. While mathematics was certainly not her field, she could appreciate the beauty of his thinking, the precision of words, the cleverness of mind.

For all she knew, it had all been just an exercise in futility. Perhaps nothing she'd done had helped the investigation. Perhaps the law had won this time and her life would never be her own again.

She opened her eyes and watched the road retreat behind them and wondered if her father was right; maybe they needed to consider a long-term solution to their problem.

Beneath her, she could feel the forward acceleration of the truck slow and the rumble of the brakes as they slowed further and the vehicle eased into a turn, then rattled from side to side before those movements eased and the truck began to pick up speed.

"They'll be a town soon," she said aloud. "Tenemos que dejar para gas."

The little boy only blinked as if to acknowledge her.

He continued to look at her with wary eyes and she wondered how much harder his life would be on the other side of the law when the sound like that of a gunshot exploded beneath them and the truck's rumbles became deafening as they lurched violently forward then back before being slammed to one side. She remembered little more than trying to reach for the boy and clutching the girl as they all seemed to tumble into the air.

**A/N: I really do appreciate the reviews and alerts. Because my Internet access is so limited, I'm trying to "thank" readers and reviewers and alerters (yes, I make up words) by publishing chapters of some length and substance fairly often. While the characters are playing nicely in my head these days and I do have the end scene written, the chapters in between will come in irregular spurts. I write daily, but sometimes things click and sometimes they don't and I'm generally a pretty slow writer.**


	12. Phase 12

**Phase 12: Paper Locks**

**Enjoy!**

oOo

One hundred miles of silence.

He watched the odometer change even as the scenery around them seemed to be the same ocean of corn in all directions.

One hundred miles.

He should feel better. He was a hundred miles closer to his daughter, a hundred miles closer to holding her again. He should be celebrating that, but closing the distance was bittersweet.

Then the odometer changed to begin counting another hundred miles of silence.

Russ sighed and for a moment, Booth thought he might say something, but that moment passed and he turned his head to look out at the green waves of corn.

He had nothing to say, either. He could touch the keys they'd retrieved in the pasture, recount the answers they'd gotten at the bus station, recheck the train schedules for the area, but none of those things would bring her back.

Temperance Brennan might be lost to him.

He didn't want to believe it. But he'd been fighting back that feeling for so long that he was tired of the battle and he just wanted some small sign of hope. Just freeing her from the damned arrest warrant should have been enough to buoy his feelings for days, but he had sunk back into a sea of worry brought on by the sense that he could do almost nothing to help her.

And now?

Perhaps his Catholic guilt was nibbling at his conscience as well. If he had only been able to put thar bastard away. If only he'd acted sooner. If only. . . .

His phone vibrated and he pulled it from his pocket without a glance toward Russ.

With a single word, his last name, he broke the record 104 miles of silence.

And hearing the name and the voices on the other line finally broke another long string and finally gave him a burst of hope.

oOo

The screams from the children drew her away from the pain radiating from her back and shoulder.

Almost 90 kgs pressed down on her and above her a melon crate threatened to topple over on top of them. The acrid smell of burned rubber only confirmed that the tire had blown out, sending them careening down the road until abruptly they'd been jolted to a shuddering stop. Their angle in the bed of the truck—she estimated it to be about 35 degrees—suggested they had ended up in one of the ditches at the side of the road.

"¿Estás bien?" she asked the children crushing her. "¿Está herido?"

Tears streamed down the girl's face as her brother tried to pull himself away from her, using the open spaces in the gate of the truck for handholds. He managed to remove at least 50 kgs of pressure from Brennan and she took the opportunity to check the little girl quickly for any injuries.

"¿Estás bien?" she repeated for the little boy who was using the soles of his shoes to brace himself.

He nodded solemnly.

The truck quaked and the boy slipped toward her. The little girl, more frightened than hurt, sobbed harder and her brother began to comfort her with a string of endearments in Spanish.

The truck rocked again and she assured the children in Spanish that it was only their parents trying to get out of the truck to check on them. With some effort, she stood in the bed, bracing herself against the side of the truck and managed to bully the melon crate back on top of the others.

She felt decidedly unsteady in the truck bed, the angle and the beating her body had taken combined to work against her.

"Estás sangrando," said the boy, pointing at her. "Su cabeza."

She swiped at the sweat at her temple and looked at the streak of blood in her palm. "Estoy bien," she said. "Es sólo un rasguño."

The little girl was wide-eyed with fear and the tracks of her tears still glistened on her cheeks.

"¿Rosa? ¿Carlos? ¿Son usted bien, mis bebés? ¿Hacen daño a usted?"

The children called back to their parents, reassuring them that they were fine, and asking the same questions of their parents—are you fine? Were you hurt? What are we going to do?

It was the question that consumed Brennan. The crates had shifted enough making egress through the window of the truck cab nearly impossible. The angle of the truck suggested that the one door available to their parents—the driver's side—was the only exit available to them.

She heard the muffled sound of the door clicking open, then shutting almost at once as if the occupants of the cab did not have enough leverage or strength to prop it open. Each effort drew a shudder through the vehicle.

We need to get out of here, she told the children in Spanish. They can't get out of the truck. We need to open the gate and help them.

Normally it was an easy operation—reach over the top of the gate and remove the steel rods that held it closed. But the angle and gravity made that a challenge.

She told the boy what she needed him to do and he called out to his parents, "Mamá. Papá. Estamos para ayudarle." Then he shifted positions with her, taking the low end of the bed while she pulled herself to the high point.

Can you get the bolt out? she asked him in Spanish.

He was bent over the gate, straining to reach it, but he couldn't.

Her side wasn't easy. The angle and pitch of the bed made just reaching for the bolt a mission requiring acrobatics and strength. On the third try, she managed to grab the top and fingered her way down to the chain that attached it to the truck bed. It gave her greater leverage to pull at the chain and free the bolt.

Using the top of the gate as a handrail, she made the return trip, waving both children away from the corner of the bed. Leaning over the side, she easily removed the bolt and pushed at the gate.

It banged against the bumper, sending up a shudder under and around them.

Climbing down, she helped the boy, then the girl onto solid ground, then watched as they scrambled up the sides of the ditch and disappeared onto the road. She gingerly climbed up, her head throbbing, and joined the children in the road where they could stand and assess the damage. The passenger side of the truck was angled downward in the ditch making it impossible to open that door, while the driver's side faced the sky.

From inside the cab came the muffled cries of the woman and the deeper voice of the man calling to them.

The road stretched in both directions between tall rows of corn, empty of any traffic save the birds that used it as a landing strip to hunt for insects on the graying asphalt.

She took a breath and steeled herself as her muscles protested her climb up to the truck cab. Using the step, she braced herself awkwardly, but with the man pushing from within and her pulls from without, they were able to open the door.

"I need something to prop it open," she called down to the boy, who, with his sister, had been shouting up encouragements.

Between rocks and sticks they settled on a flat stone that held the door at an angle acceptable for egress.

Hopping down from her perch, she watched as the man gingerly found the step with his foot, then climbed from the cab, flattening himself against the cab before finding the right angle and hopping down. Calling up instructions, the man talked his wife out of the truck cab and onto the step. But her foot slipped and she went shrieking off the cab, landing awkwardly. She began wailing, clutching her arm as she rocked back and forth.

In a flurry of Spanish and English, she broke through the tight circle that had formed around the woman and began examining the arm.

This was something she knew. The small knob of bone pushed against flesh and she felt along the break and along the bone, the sensation both familiar and distant.

"I can set the bone," she said. "Puedo configurar el hueso."

But she was still the stranger, the extra cash to help balance the books at the end of the month and the woman only continued to cry as her husband tried to comfort her. She straightened and climbed back into the truck bed, peeling wood from one of the broken crates and locating a cotton shirt she'd managed to buy at a thrift shop.

The woman was already sending up prayers to her god and Brennan was wont to tell her that prayers were not nearly as effective in setting the bone as she would be, but she remained silent, only bending to the work of ripping the shirt into strips of cloth.

"You'll need to hold her," she instructed the man in Spanish. He understood. The man sent the boy back to the ditch with his sister to gather wildflowers at the side of the road "por su mama."

"This is going to hurt," she told the woman. "Vamos a enderezar el brazo. Va a doler."

The man wrapped himself around his wife as a brace and with a solemn nod to the woman, Brennan pulled.

oOo

He played her voice again.

The message had some coded hoohah that made more sense to Max than it did to him, but it didn't mean any less.

She was alive.

Her voice was strained and tired sounding, and he could imagine being separated from Christine for only a little while had tested her, but she definitely sounded alive and she had claimed that she was well. Everything else could be fixed later.

"According to Dad, she's what, a day behind us?" Russ paused in eating his sandwich and did the mental calculations. "Rural routes are at least 10 mph slower than highways, then there are the towns which means. . . ."

The math didn't matter much to him. What mattered, the _only thing_ that mattered was that she was alive and slowly making her way back to Christine and to Max. And in a couple of days they'd all be together.

_Together_.

He picked up his iced tea and eyed the other messages on his phone. He wanted to play the message over and over and over until he could hear the real thing, see the real thing, but he held off as the voice replaying in his head only reminded him they weren't together yet.

"If there aren't any problems along the road," Russ was saying, "my guess is we should see her the day after tomorrow at the earliest."

It was more hope than educated guess, but he'd take it.

"You okay with this?" Russ asked over his sandwich. "I know you're pretty pissed at Dad, but are you angry with my sister? Tempe taking off like that, it hasn't been easy for you. I know how angry Tempe was with me. Fifteen years of being angry at me. And she's never quite forgiven Dad."

"Are you still angry with her for taking off with your kid?"

That was the question he'd been struggling with. He washed down his own sandwich with his tea and tabled that question for later. "What are you, a dog whisperer or something?" It was an easier discussion. "I thought that dog was going to make minced meat out of you and then here you come out of that garage with the dog on a leash. I think that dog would have followed you anywhere."

But Russ wasn't so easily distracted from the topic. "I thought Tempe had the temper," Russ countered, his eyes never leaving his. "Guy was ready to tell you just about anything he was so scared. Is that what happens when someone gets on the wrong side of you?"

He might want to let it go, figure out later how and what he was feeling about a reunion with Bones, but Russ didn't. In Russ' eyes was a challenge.

"Bones does the rational thing." He was trying to replay the argument he had had with himself weeks ago. "Running was the rational thing."

"And you're good with it?" Russ sat back, wiping a napkin across his mouth. "You're sure you're still not angry at her for running?"

Booth crumpled the napkin in his hand and wondered if Russ had been talking to Sweets: _that_ seemed to be his question of the week.

"I've seen both sides, Booth," Russ said his gaze intense, "Running and being run out on. You know my sister—she takes no prisoners when it comes to the truth. Just be honest with her."

Booth studied his hands and wondered. _Was he still angry?_

And despite all the time that had passed, all the emotions that had come and gone, Booth really wasn't sure of the answer.

oOo

She just wanted him to leave.

As grateful as she was for his tractor and his expertise in pulling the truck from the ditch, she really just wanted him to leave to allow her to signal the Vasquez family and to drive off. But the man, Matthew Connolly, seemed much more inclined to stand in the middle of the road with her and talk.

And talk.

Comments about local events_—"three high school students turned their truck over about a dozen times and landed in the middle of Jake Weatherby's cornfield"_ _—_she could handle, no matter how exaggerated they might be.

She could even handle the occasional glance at her breasts or the comments about the state of her clothing—she and Sr. Vasquez had muscled a new tire onto the truck practically lying on their backs and while it had gone quickly, her shirt bore the marks.

She was having some difficulty with ending the conversation.

"You headed over to the farmer's market in Larabee?"

Her father's rule had been to allow people to assume certain details, so she had nodded and hoped Connolly would leave soon. But he was leaning against the back of the truck in a posture that suggested he was in no particular hurry to return to his farm, peppering her with questions that he answered as if to spur on his mostly one-sided conversation.

She knew the more time she spent with him meant he had more time to record the details of her face. With no makeup and her hair pulled back into a ponytail there was little to disguise the general architecture of her face. The baseball cap only obscured the details to some degree, but she felt vulnerable like this.

It had been why she'd offered him a couple of crates of melons in payment for his kindness, why she'd thanked him again and again in a vain effort to hurry him along, why she kept saying she had to leave. But it wasn't as if she could simply climb back into the truck and take off—the tractor straddled the narrow road and there was no way to simply turn the truck around without ending up back in the ditch. But he had followed her back to rear of the truck, had helped her close the back gate, and had proceeded to tell her more about farming conditions in the area.

"I really should be going," she said, her accent borrowed from the northern part of the state on the license plate of the truck. "I'm already a half day behind and I thought I'd be in Larabee before the night."

"Oh, you've got time," he said, seemingly digging in for another volley of talk. "Larabee's but an hour away, especially if you take highway. . . ."

She half-listened, noticing some movement in the distance.

A lone vehicle, little more than a speck on the road was approaching and she secretly cheered the driver. Connolly craned his neck, then slowly smiled.

"That's Dawes."

"Dawes?" she asked, trying to appear polite.

"Frank Dawes." The car closed the distance and even she could see who Dawes was. Or at least the mars lights visible through the windshield indicated _what_ Dawes was.

The law.

oOo

Sweets practically vibrated with anger. "He keeps putting up roadblocks when he should be giving us free rein to go after Pelant. He shouldn't do that."

Angela kept one eye focused on her computer and one on Sweets. "He shouldn't do what? Mix his metaphors?"

"I don't see how you can all be so calm." Sweets really was having a hard time dealing and Angela felt sympathy for him. Nothing about the situation had been easy and they had had few reasons to be optimistic, but word from the computer techs at the FBI had given her some good news that morning and Hodgins had surprised her with a project he'd been working on that had shown some real promise.

And Booth had called. His had been the best news.

"You know how Brennan is," she said, "she likes to know everything about the case? Well, that's what we're doing, Sweets."

"You've all looked at the evidence a dozen times," he groused. "And you come up with something and Flynn will shut you down or pull you from the case."

"Hey, Sweets," she countered, "weren't you the one who said we can 't give up? Weren't you the one who got Flynn to let you re-examine the evidence?"

He sighed heavily and nodded. "It's just damned frustrating."

"We're not giving up, Sweets." She began to run the finished facial reconstruction of their latest murder victim into the Angelatron. "We're making progress. Miss Julian's back at work, and Cam said. . . ."

But she didn't finish her thought. The Maryland DMV database provided a match to her facial reconstruction and the name was all-too-familiar.

Sweets read the screen: "Derek Sims." He shook his head at the coincidence. "That's our deliveryman."

"Let's see Flynn ignore this."

**A/N: My high school Spanish is rusty, so if what I've written isn't quite correct, my apologies. Online translators don't capture nuances of language. **

**Happy 4****th**** of July to my fellow United Statesians! (I'm off to do a rain dance. . . .)**


	13. Phase 13

**Phase 13: Paper Locks**

**Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's back to writing I go. . . .**

oOo

She could have imagined a worse scenario for her heroine.

In fact, she had. Dr. Kathy Reichs once swam through sewers teeming with rats and refuse, had dangled from the end of a rope while a madman sawed at her lifeline, and had been almost hopelessly lost in the middle of a South American jungle with armed guerrillas tracking her movements.

But this time, she was not writing her heroine in and out of danger; she was experiencing it first hand:

_On a lone country road, miles from the busiest highway, a tractor effectively blocking one means of escape for a woman wanted for murder while the sheriff behind her bars another. On either side are cornfields—and in one of them are the four illegal immigrants she'd been traveling with in a truck she is now not certain had not been stolen. Whatever makeup or devices she'd used to disguise her appearance have long been abandoned or lost save her dark hair and it seems the only things she has going for her are a quick mind and martial arts skills that might quell the two men near her. Her sole rescuer is still a hundred or more miles away and she couldn't contact him directly if she tried. _

What else could she do but surrender?

oOo

He couldn't let her go.

In his arms, Christine was a bundle of pure joy, a slightly larger bundle than he'd remembered from months earlier, her personality much more evident, but she was in his arms finally and for that moment, it was all that mattered. She smelled of talcum powder and baby shampoo and he breathed her in, closing his eyes for a brief moment before opening his eyes and drinking her in all over again.

"She's been a bit fussy," Max was saying. "She could be teething."

Something burned in his chest, practically screamed to be released, but he held it in and simply wrapped his arms tighter around Christine.

"So she's supposed to meet you here in the park?" Russ asked. He stood to the side, scanning the edges of the park. "Are you sure she didn't go to the other place?"

Max leaned back on the park bench and shook his head. "She'd know to meet me here. " Booth felt the con man's eyes on him. "I had no control over a couple of car thieves."

Booth felt that burning in his chest again and as if a barometer of his changing mood, Christine began to fuss in his arms.

"She hasn't been sleeping through the night," Max said. "She's been missing her mom."

"And me," Booth said under his breath, but Russ had caught his words and gave him a worried look.

He was trying, but the anger came in waves along with crests of worry and guilt. Once he was a master at comforting his daughter, but now she seemed to wriggle and fuss more, her face warning of a tsunami as he battled to control his own emotions.

"I could go see if maybe she's at the other place," Russ said. "She might have run into some trouble getting here."

"It's a start," Booth said. He tried to soften the edge in his voice. "Are there any other places where she could have gone? Stops along the way? Colleagues she might have mentioned?"

Max gave him a long hard look before answering. "Tempe didn't want to put anyone else at risk. And she wouldn't abandon her kid."

"But she abandoned me," he countered.

"You know exactly why she had to leave you, Booth." Max wasn't taking the bait, but he wasn't backing down, either. "That bastard who killed her friend and who's got all of you chasing your tails is the reason she ran. He wants her dead because he knows she's the one who can get him."

"It's in your DNA." Booth couldn't help it; the fury was leaking out and in a moment it might well become a tidal wave. "That's what you Brennans do. Run."

Max narrowed his eyes. "Tempe didn't do anything wrong. Sure, I did some things I'm not exactly proud of, and Russ got into some trouble, but not Tempe. "

"This must have been killing Tempe," Russ said. "Ever since we were kids she liked rules and order. Didn't surprise me she was working for the FBI."

"The system was going to destroy my daughter," Max continued. "And I'll do anything to protect my family."

"Enough," Booth growled. Christine let loose a cry and began wriggling in his arms reaching for Max. "It's okay." Booth began to rub her belly the same way he had done all those weeks ago. "Daddy's here and we're going to find your mother." He kept up a steady stream of words meant to comfort his daughter and distract her from the tension around her. But try as he might, nothing was giving him much comfort, even the tiny being in his arms.

And especially not Max. "I don't care if they've dropped the warrant for her arrest," Max said. "She's not safe as long as that bastard Pelant is still loose."

oOo

No news, thought Dr. Cam Saroyan, was just that, no news. Booth's phone call last night had been terse and tense—no one knew where Brennan was or how long it might take before she met up with her father and her daughter.

So no news was just that—no news.

The lab, however, seemed to be generating its own news hourly on the Sims murder investigation. Dr. Edison's preliminary examination already pointed toward an explosive device having been used to kill the young driver. Squintern-of-the-week Wendell Bray had assisted with the initial examination and was now hovering around Hodgins' worktable in the Ookie room as the bones were being cleaned in the boiler.

"Any news, Dr. Hodgins?"

He had almost two dozen slides already prepared and he was working his way through them. Looking up from the microscope, he pointed to a petri dish. "The plant material found in his chest happens to be cantaloupe."

"Death by cantaloupe?" Even Wendell seemed amused by the prospect. "Then he lies for days in what is essentially a fruit salad. Gotta love the irony in that."

Hodgins only shrugged. "Hey, I'm just telling you that the organic matter that hitched a ride on the magnesium residue was the rind from a _Cucumis melo_. It's separate from the other organic matter that the victim was laying in. But I'm still sifting through everything."

She sighed. Agent Flynn wasn't a man known for his sense of humor and the few quips that sprang instantly to mind would only offer up one-sided amusement. So she simply pulled out her cell phone and tried to hold back her comments.

Booth would probably appreciate a few quick jabs at levity, but nothing was as it had been and wishing something didn't make it so. It was a time like this when she could practically hear Dr. Brennan's voice in her head reminding her of the evils of something as unquantifiable as hope leeching into the lab.

"Dr. Saroyan?"

She paused and turned toward the young intern.

"I was wondering if you could confirm something for me?" He looked uncomfortable. "Will Dr. Brennan be allowed to return to the Jeffersonian?"

The ripple effects of Dr. Brennan's run had certainly upset the waters of the Jeffersonian and each squintern had taken their turn in the rotation worried if it was going to be their last.

"I don't think you need to worry about that, Mr. Bray. The Jeffersonian is not shutting down the Medico Legal Lab."

"I don't mean to be rude, but that's not really what I asked, Dr. Saroyan." The young man standing in front of her was a far cry from the somewhat unsteady intern who had started at the Jeffersonian years earlier. "I know it might not be my place to ask, but we're all kind of wondering. I mean the other interns and myself."

"I thought you enjoyed working with Dr. Edison."

She was fighting a question with avoidance, and the moment the words escaped she knew they could be interpreted in an unflatteringly way.

But Wendell, in typical manner, didn't react to her statement. "It's important, Dr. Saroyan." He squared his shoulders and plunged in. "Many of us sought internships here at the Jeffersonian specifically so we could work with Dr. Brennan. This isn't a slam on Dr. Edison, but he isn't Dr. B."

Even Dr. Hodgins had stopped working and was looking on.

She sighed. "That's really a matter for the Jeffersonian board to answer, Mr. Bray."

Hodgins gave her a look, one she was sure spoke volumes more than she could handle at that moment. Wendell's eyes darted downward, then he gave her his own long, steady look tinged with worry.

"Has anything been officially decided? It's pretty important to all of us to know who we'll be working with in the lab."

"The government's paying the bills," Hodgins interjected. "They like their scientists meek and mild."

She almost wanted a Hodgins rant about corruption or conspiracy to sidetrack this conversation. But Wendell wasn't retreating.

"Nothing has been decided," she said. "Dr. Brennan's situation is still under review." She stood for a moment longer, weighing the cell phone in her hand against the weight of the conversation. "I think we should follow Dr. Brennan's advice about speculation right now."

Wendell nodded grimly, but Hodgins had that wild-eyed conspiracy glint in his eyes. "The board is ready to kowtow to a homogenized. . . ."

"Dr. Hodgins," Wendell cut him short, "this is important. We need to know."

She was a sucker for the pleading look in his eyes.

"I promise you, Mr. Bray, as soon as I know something definitive, I will let all of the squinterns know."

It was not her best answer, but it was the only one she could give. Hodgins continued giving her a look but Wendell didn't move.

"I guess I'll have to be satisfied with that," Wendell said. "There's something more, Dr. Saroyan."

She closed her eyes, shook her head and sighed. "Yes, of course, there is." Then a thought struck her. "You're not going to quit, are you Mr. Bray?"

"No," he said quickly. "I'm not planning on doing that." He looked a bit flustered. "It's just that we're checking the message boards."

She simply stared at him.

"You know. The Brennanites."

"Message boards?"

"Well, all of the interns have been taking turns checking them. For the past three months."

She still didn't understand, but Dr. Hodgins apparently had a better handle on Wendell's thread of thought than she did.

"Dude, you guys have been keeping track of what they're saying about Dr. B?"

She still didn't understand.

"No, well, we are keeping track of what they're saying, but it's more than that." Wendell took a deep breath. "It's Daisy's turn this week."

She held up the hand that held her cell phone and tried to steer the conversation. "I don't understand, Mr. Bray. Why are you monitoring the message boards?"

"To find Dr. Brennan."

"Wendell," Hodgins said, "I think Dr. Saroyan needs to know a little more."

Wendell reset himself. "Okay. One of us stumbled into one of the Brennanite forums online. At first it was basically a discussion about whether Dr. B could have killed Ethan Sawyer and then how long she could go on the run without being caught. A good 97 percent of the Brennanites felt she had to have been framed because she left too many clues pointing to her as being the killer. They think she's too smart for that."

"Ninety-seven percent?"

"Yeah, they took an online poll."

"And?"

"They've been keeping tabs on any news about Dr. B," Wendell dove in. "Essentially, it's 'Where's Waldo,' except with the Brennanites, it's 'Where's Brennan?'"

But Cam couldn't help but see their help differently. "This is the same group that spawned that triple murder a few years back? Three fans got rid of three people by killing each other's victim?"

"I've been online with them, Dr. Saroyan," Wendell said, his earnestness in full bloom, "and they're not crazy. A bit obsessed, maybe, but they're tied into law enforcement somehow. Minutes after the warrant against Dr. B was dropped, they knew."

"The Internet had a hand in the Arab uprisings last summer," he continued. "Reunited people with their lost dogs, helped bring about an end to pink slime. Online communities are pretty powerful."

Cam understood the need to feel useful, especially in the light of all that had happened, but she wasn't sure anything on the Internet would bode well for a woman framed by a computer genius.

"No one's discussing the case with them," he continued, "we're just listening in. They've got a whole network set up, they call it the Bone of Truth."

"Pelant might already have tapped into that network," Hodgins said. "They might be funneling information to Pelant without knowing it."

Cam saw the disaster that could form as well.

"No," he insisted. "We've been monitoring the chat room at all times. A squintern, I mean." He seemed slightly embarrassed by the admission. "The minute we hear something we'll report it directly to Agent Booth."

Cam was momentarily stunned. "How long has this been going on?"

"It just started when the FBI dropped the warrant against her." He took a step closer. "And I know that Dr. B got separated from her father. It's hard to keep a secret around here."

She dared a glance at Hodgins.

"He knows what's at risk, Dr. Saroyan," he said. "Wendell's seen Pelant's handiwork."

"They were going to do this anyway," Wendell said. "And we couldn't persuade them to shut down. So we just thought it would be better if we listened in on the information. It's Daisy's turn this week."

She closed her eyes and sent up a prayer that well-meaning people wouldn't get Dr. Brennan killed. _This_ definitely was _not _going into her report to Agent Flynn.

oOo

She stood in the middle of that road and fought the urge to laugh.

It was utterly irrational to burst into laughter, utterly insane to give into the emotion that was probably fueled as much by physical and mental exhaustion as well as the last dregs of the adrenaline from the accident.

It was just not rational.

"Whatcha doin', Matt, blocking my road?" The sheriff left his car door ajar as he made the short walk toward them. "I can think of easier ways to pick up girls."

Temperance Brennan wanted to correct the sheriff—it wasn't his road, Connolly wasn't trying to pick her up (she thought) and she certainly wasn't a girl. But the woman she had to be won over the objections.

"Have you come by to arrest me, Sheriff?" She smiled and shook her head as if to dismiss the laughter that was leaking out. "It's been that kind of a day."

The sheriff leaned in and she could smell him—a spicy aftershave with a hint of hot baths and cool drinks and clean clothes and soft, welcoming beds—and all she wanted now was a small piece of that life.

"Anyone hurt?"

Again, she shook her head and chuckled. "I'm just tired and sore and desperate for a long, hot soak in a tub followed by 48 hours in bed." She knew how innuendo worked and while it had not been her intention, she could see something in the facial expression of the sheriff that should sober her, but even that couldn't dampen the odd streak of laughter that kept her captive. "And I'm off schedule, down a tire and if it hadn't been for the kindness of this man. . . ."

Sweeping her hand toward Connolly, she stopped as another burble of laughter threatened to overwhelm her.

"I think this counts as a bad day," the sheriff said. "Name's Dawes, Sheriff Frank Dawes."

Like dozens of times before, she accepted an officer's hand and shook it. Yet unlike those dozens of times, she didn't hand out her real name with its title as a means of pointing out her value to the police, she offered only the name printed on the license in her pocket and waited for the man to call her a liar and pull out his cuffs.

But that didn't happen.

Instead the sheriff, probably used to all kinds of reactions from people in trying circumstances, simply began to walk around the truck. "Did she come out straight?" he asked Connolly.

The farmer nodded. "Straight as an arrow," he said. "No wobble. I don't think she bent the axle."

She had to concentrate to understand what they were talking about as exhaustion warred with reason and the burst of energy that had accompanied the odd laughter now began to fade.

The sheriff kicked at each tire in turn and then patted the side of the truck. "You got lucky, Miss," he offered. "Might have cracked an axle, ended up on your side."

"I wasn't speeding," she said. "I just couldn't. . . ."

"Little thing like yourself," he countered, "tire probably blew out and all hell broke loose."

She smiled. It was the Roxy smile, free and easy, but Wanda was waiting in the wings to take over. Temperance had moved aside for fear she might give herself away.

"What you carrying?" the sheriff asked. "You're not from around here. Most produce travels by highway."

"Just melons, Sheriff." Max's voice in her head cautioned her to _keep_ _it simple_. "I wanted to see the crop conditions."

"You're lucky it wasn't a melon stew after all the jarring you went through." The sheriff studied the truck. "Matt, here, give you a hand changing that tire?"

Her clothes bore skid marks where she and the old and the new tires had wrestled. But she hadn't done it alone.

"No, Frank. She managed that one on her own," Connolly stepped in. "She had to be lying on her back to change that damned thing. The way the truck was angled, she just had to loosen the bolts and let it drop off that rig."

It was more than that, but she let Connolly talk growing a bit more wary of the sheriff who seemed particularly interested in the back of the truck.

The flat tire still sat at the side of the ditch where she and Sr. Vasquez had left it and she wondered now it that had been a mistake. She wasn't sure she could lift the tire into the back of the truck alone and that might give her away.

"Look, Sheriff, if you need something more from me, I've really got to be going." She tried not to sound too desperate, another suggestion from her father still rattling around in her head. "I was supposed to meet some friends in Larabee."

The sheriff leaned in, his eyes never really leaving hers.

An attractive woman—even if she was hot and dusty and dirty—and two men in the middle of a country road in the middle of nowhere and she got it. She finally got it.

She smiled. Looked the sheriff in the eye and lied. Lied like lives were depending on it.

Because lives were.

"I've never been to the market at Larabee," she said, trying to play this like Roxy or Wanda and not like Laura or Diana or any of the woman she had been these past months. Certainly not like Temperance who was always several beats behind on situations like these. "My friends said it's pretty popular. I bet you know all the sellers there."

The sheriff liked to be the one holding court and she let him. Let him tell her about the market over in Larabee, a market she had no intention of ever going to. Let him then regale her with a story of how he'd located a renegade marijuana field and burned it and how—she smiled despite the absurdity of the story—the cows downwind had been smiling for days.

She let Dawes tell his tales and give his advice and she smiled through it all, her eyes never averted, her accent steady and sure, her mind constantly aware of the Vasquez family still hiding maybe a couple of hundred feet away and of her daughter Christine tucked aware safely with her father a day or so away and she lied. She lied by pretending to care, she lied by pretending to listen.

Temperance Brennan, a woman committed to the truth since so much of it had been hidden from her, a woman devoted to shedding light on darkness, was now living her mother's life.

"You know," said the sheriff, "you look familiar to me. Have you been in the area before?"

"Got a better line that that, Frank?" Connolly was leaning on the truck.

She smiled despite the desire to run, and shook her head. "No. I haven't been out this way since, what's it been? Ten years or so? I can't believe you've been a sheriff here that long."

Roxy could flirt and flaunt her femininity even as grimy as Temperance felt. Wanda could drive a truck and haul melons from one part of the state to the other. And Temperance could look at the responses and determine which would provide her the best escape from what was growing to be a most uncomfortable situation.

"No," he said, "I've had this job going on 12 years now. I tell you, you do look like someone I've seen before."

"Even I would have some difficulty figuring out who I was under all this dirt, Sheriff."

Her comment elicited a slight smile from Connolly, but the Sheriff only squinted at her. A sense of panic began forming.

"Matt, you better get going. I'll help her with the tire."

She thanked Connolly again and wondered if the sheriff was doing what Booth did sometimes—take the person aside before arresting them. But the sheriff was walking over to where the tire lay and she followed him and bent to help him roll the damaged tire back to the truck where they stowed it beneath the truck bed.

The tractor was slowly fading into the distance. "You keep this vehicle on the road, Miss," the sheriff said as he tipped his hat to her.

And as he returned to his vehicle, she walked steadily back to the truck, pulling the keys from her pocket. In a backward glance she saw the sheriff behind the wheel of the car looking backwards as he backed it up toward an access road. With a neat little V, the sheriff car was moving in the opposite direction.

And she gave into the laughter.

It spilled out of her in a high, nervous laugh that quickly dissolved into dry sobs that seemed to overwhelm her and she leaned against the truck.

But it only lasted a moment. She wearily pulled herself together before climbing into the truck and starting the engine. She could still see the tractor, like Aesop's tortoise, slowly making its way back toward the Connolly farm. When it disappeared, she tapped the horn once and then waited for the Vasquez family to emerge from the shelter of the cornfield.

And as irrational as it was, as wasteful as it might be, she hoped that nothing else would get in the way of reaching her daughter and her father.

oOo

She wanted to surrender, but she couldn't.

It was difficult, damned difficult to fall asleep given everything she was juggling. While the lab was functioning and they were still the primary lab looking at all the evidence in the murders of Inger Johannsen, Ezra Crane, Ethan Sawyer and now Derek Sims, it was still a balancing act.

Everything by the book.

And everyone around her conspiring to re-write their chapters—Hodgins, Angela, Wendell and the squinterns, the board, the FBI. . . .

And Pelant. Always Pelant.

She gave up and threw the covers off and pulled a robe on and made her way toward the kitchen.

These late night soirees into the kitchen were becoming a habit, she thought, a dangerous habit laden with two very bad choices—calories in the form of a very good Chardonnay chilling in the refrigerator or in the form of a large dish of chocolate ice cream smothered in nuts and chocolate sauce and whipped. . . .

"You're up late." Michelle came up behind her. "And on a school night, too."

She turned and smiled sheepishly at her daughter. "I can't sleep."

"Again."

She nodded. "Again."

Michelle crossed to the refrigerator and opened the freezer. "Frozen foods have no calories because calories are a unit of heat."

She could have laughed at Michelle's comment. These days she was fighting on too many fronts and the comfort of chocolate or the sweet oblivion of a drink were much too intoxicating escapes.

"Yogurt," she said. "It's cold, so it applies."

Michelle smirked and changed doors on the refrigerator. "We'll live dangerously and eat the kind with the granola."

_This_ was why she loved having Michelle in her life. She could remind her with a simple look or in a comment that there was a life outside the lab, outside the horrors of maggot-ridden bodies and arrogant serial killers.

And she didn't mind being waited on.

That was happening more and more these days, it seemed. They'd reversed roles— Michelle playing the part of the reasonable sounding board while she remained confused and uncertain that anything she did these days was making a difference.

"It's the Pelant case, isn't it?" Michelle asked as she slid the carton of yogurt toward her. "Finn says it's hanging over the lab like a heavy fog or some such thing."

She considered her newest intern. "I'm sure he said it in a much more colorful way."

Michelle's eyes told the story. Finn would have wrapped his observation in some quaint country colloquialism and Michelle would boil it down to bare bones.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Her answer was consumed in the distinct ring of her cell phone. She sighed and made the short walk to the table where she'd deposited it and her purse.

"Saroyan."

She asked the officer on the other line to repeat the message twice before she remembered to jot down the address on the piece of paper Michelle handed her.

"Are you sure?" she asked again.

The officer repeated the message for the third time before hanging up.

And it took some time before she could focus on the very concerned face of her daughter or the fact that she was standing in the middle of her kitchen in a robe, the address of a crime scene in hand.

"I have to go," she said, but her voice sounded odd, detached somehow.

"There's been a murder?" Michelle's expression of concern only deepened.

"Yes," she finally managed. She closed her eyes and tried to center herself. "I want you to call Finn and ask him to come over tonight."

"You mean for dinner?"

"No," Cam said, still trying to process the information. "Now. Right now." She handed Michelle her cell phone. "Tell him it's an emergency."

Michelle began dialing and Cam glanced at the paper in her hand. While she read the numbers, they didn't make sense as if they were in another language entirely.

"I woke him up and he said he's coming over," Michelle was saying. "He wanted to know if you're here, too."

"No, I'm. . . ," she paused and took a deep breath. "When he gets here I want the two of you to stay here. In the morning, I want the both of you to go to the diner for breakfast. I'll meet you there and we'll talk about what our options are."

"Cam, you're scaring me." Michelle had closed the distance between them. "What the hell happened?"

Cam steeled herself.

"Agent Flynn is dead."

oOo

**A/N: Sorry about the delay. The Midwest heat and I don't get along too well; the heat's been winning. Thank you to the kind reader who mentioned the Brennanites earlier in a review. I hadn't thought to use them in the story, but I think they might prove useful. **


	14. Phase 14

**Phase 14: Paper Locks**

oOo

Two mornings in a row he awoke from a strange bed and padded his way into the kitchen hoping to start the coffee before Christine woke up. He managed to measure the coffee and pour the water before a small, sharp cry alerted him and he made a U-turn to go comfort his daughter and start their day.

Two days in a row he waited for a phone call that never came.

Oh, he got phone calls. Assistant Deputy Director Hacker was at the top of that list providing him with updates on Special Agent Flynn's untimely death which brought out the bigger guns in several calls from the Deputy Director of the FBI with not only updates, but a thinly veiled plea for his assistance in solving the mystery.

He got phone calls.

The worst ones were from Cam. Flynn's death had shaken her even if she wouldn't admit it and when she had asked him when he was planning to return to D.C., the tremor in her voice had made him bend just a little and he almost said he and Christine would be on the next plane home.

Almost.

One of his oldest friends was frightened. Christopher Pelant—if it was Pelant and he was damned sure it was—was arrogantly sending them a message that he would and could kill any of them if he chose to with little fear of being caught. She'd engineered a trip for Michelle to stay with her father's cousins in Chicago and had practically been living at the lab as she juggled two investigations and the Special Agents attached to each case.

And he got more phone calls.

Russ called with updates from the first meeting place Bones and her father had arranged. Caroline Julian called to tell him she had been officially re-instated and when was he going to get his sweet ass back to D.C. to welcome her back? Sweets called to ask him how he was and he always managed an end run around the shrinky stuff before hanging up.

The only positive phone calls came with his daily conversations with his son, Parker, who was safely ensconced in England with his mother in their English-y sounding flat. In those calls he could lose himself for a moment, pretend that everything would turn out well and that somehow believe there was an oasis of sanity and happiness somewhere in the world.

But the phone call he was desperate for, the one phone call he would drop everything for, never came.

oOo

Twice Cam had walked in on her and Michael in her office and twice she hadn't said anything.

That was the state of the lab.

She knew just how stressed everyone was—hadn't she and Hodgins had an argument over nothing that morning, one in which he hadn't turned peacemaker immediately as he usually did—and she hadn't meant to violate lab rules, but with the long hours and the almost incessant work, it had just seemed more practical to have Michael nearby than down the hall in the nursery.

She knew it was more than just workplace rules and legal issues with having her child at work, but Cam had said nothing, steering through her office looking for updates and no trouble.

And they had trouble, plenty of it.

Some great mind in the bureau had assigned two agents to the cases in the lab—one for the Sims murder and the other for Flynn's death. It didn't seem very efficient—another government screw-up, Hodgins had called it—and it really wasn't. Flynn's investigation was split between the FBI lab and theirs and it seemed that they knew more than the techs.

Pelant killed Flynn.

Officially, the elevator he had been riding in at the Wieboldt building had stalled at the 60th floor then plunged to the basement level. A tragic accident, the papers called it: the computer running the elevator had failed as had the maintenance crew which had been ordered two days earlier to remove the safety stops at the bottom of the elevator shaft to be replaced at a future time.

Pelant killed Flynn.

They knew it, but they couldn't prove it.

That was the state of the lab.

She could practically hear Brennan's voice in her head urging them to only deal with the evidence, only deal with the facts that they could prove, but she paradoxically wanted to dismiss her best friend's words as well as cling to them.

Just staring at her computer screen wasn't helping much and she rubbed her eyes and wondered if she would chance another trip to the daycare without incurring the wrath of the staff there or if she would simply kidnap her own kid and bring him back to her office.

Again.

But common sense won over maternal sense and she decided to make her way to the Ookie room where Jack was.

He'd been buried examining the evidence in Sims' murder and had been given only a cursory look at the evidence in Flynn's death, so his frustration level mirrored her own. They'd taken it out on each other that morning and if nothing else, she was going to use this visit to repair that damage.

He was bent over a microscope, his face a study in concentration.

"Hey," she greeted him, uncertain of her reception.

He looked up from the microscope and gave her a tentative smile. "Hey."

"Thought you might need a break," she offered.

His smile grew slowly. "I'd like that."

This was the ebb and flow of marriage—waves to surf usually but sometimes you got caught in the undertow. But from the look he gave her, they were going to be all right.

"I thought I'd go down to the daycare and spend some time with Michael," she said. "But since I've been down there like a million times over the last couple of days, I thought I'd take you as back-up."

"Ange," he said, "you don't need permission to see our kid."

"That's why I thought I'd bring you in as backup."

He smiled at her and put up a finger. "I'm still trying to figure out where Sims could have picked up this fungus."

"You'd rather spend time with a fungus and not with me or your son?"

It was cheap manipulation, but he saw right through it. "Ange, greasy spot fungus is only found on citrus trees. It shouldn't exist in Washington, but it's on Sims' shoes."

"Maybe the fungus hitched a ride on some citrus that was at the store Sims delivered for?"

Jack shook his head. "No. The fungus kills the trees. They can't fruit." He shrugged. "Besides, the FBI techs checked the store for _Mycosphaerella citri_ and they found nothing. Nada. Zilch."

"Which brings us back to my original question." She smirked. "Do you want to go see Michael with me or not?"

Whatever they fought about that morning was long, long gone. His smile was all the reassurance she needed, but he added, "What do you think, babe?"

oOo

"I honestly can't tell you if Agent Flynn was a good guy or not, but I can tell you that I truly am scared," Dr. Saroyan admitted to Dr. Lance Sweets.

He'd walked into his office after lunch only to see Dr. Saroyan already in place on the loveseat across from his chair, both hands occupied by stress balls.

"Agent Flynn was following the letter of the law as well as his own instincts."

"And it got him killed."

He sat back in the chair and wondered when the nightmare might end. Pelant had succeeded in fracturing one of the finest forensic teams in the country by framing one of their own and now he seemed to have ramped up the game. "But we don't have any evidence to suggest it was anything but a tragic accident."

Dr. Saroyan gave him that look, that _look_, the one that the normally professional Jeffersonian team was giving everyone these days. "Pelant could have, I don't know, accessed the computers running the elevator and ordered the maintenance crew to remove safety devices in the name of upgrading or what have you." She seemed to be talking very fast. "But the bottom line is that he could have done it. Pelant could have done it."

The thought had crossed his mind the instant he had processed the news about Flynn. He hadn't always liked the man or even agreed with him, but the sequence of events—Flynn had gone to interview Pelant in the Sims murder case and later that evening he had crashed, along with his elevator car, at the bottom of an elevator shaft—had been too coincidental to be pure chance.

Or maybe they were succumbing to paranoia, pure and simple. Every murder was committed by Pelant. Everything that went wrong electronically, from the morning coffeemaker to the temporary signal loss on the TV, was all Pelant's fault.

He fell back on a familiar question. "What's your proof?"

Dr. Saroyan, who generally didn't rattle, seemed positively ready to shake apart.

"You're not helping."

When he had heard about Michelle's impromptu trip to Chicago, he hadn't thought much about it. But now. . . .

"You're afraid that Pelant is eliminating people who could expose him, expose his crimes." It was a fear they all shared. "He's arrogant, manipulative. He wants to control the game and so far, he's been very successful. Without the team and everyone working at their best, you feel vulnerable and you're concerned that Pelant might target you or other members of the team to solidify his position."

"Yes, yes to all that," Dr. Saroyan said. "But it doesn't solve the problem. What the hell are we going to do about him?"

He leaned forward and fished a stress ball from the bowl and began giving it a workout. "We find evidence that shows he murdered those people."

"That's not happening, Dr. Sweets. He's winning."

This was the point he was afraid of, the moment in which good, caring, moral people consider the bad, the wicked, the amoral solution.

He'd seen them close to folding before when Heather Taffet had Agent Booth trapped on that Navy ship and they were _this close_ to torturing the woman for information.

"The only way to beat Pelant is to find evident or elicit a confession from him. But his pathology suggests. . . ."

"I know his pathology," she interrupted. "I know what it suggests." She stood up abruptly, a move that looked at odds with a woman as elegant as she. "He's making fools out of the FBI and our team and I'll be damned if he kills another one of us."

He was a man trained to listen for anomalies in people's speech. Something odd had cropped up in her delivery and it took him seconds to determine what it was. "You said you'd be 'damned if he killed another one?' You mean Agent Flynn?"

"No. Yes." Her eyes, large with fear, now seemed like laser beams. "You and I both know that he's killed Dr. Brennan."

oOo

It was a beautiful park—a stand of trees at one end while a kaleidoscope of flowers anchored the other end. In the middle was a carpet of luxurious grass and a small play area complete with a climbing platform and slide and swings all carefully cushioned beneath with shredded rubber.

He could imagine the comments from his partner.

But she wasn't here—_wasn't that the point_—and he half-wished she would just come walking down the street he could take her to task for leaving their daughter with Max these last few days and not letting her father know where she was.

But she wasn't here.

He idly watched as Max held Christine in his arms and was showing her the array of flowers in the raised beds. He could hear the tenor of Max's voice and the excited babble of his daughter as Brennan's father pointed out pansies and petunias. He could almost hear Brennan saying something squinty about the flowers, probably call them by their Latin names or point out how each flower had their own kind of skeletal structure or some such scientific stuff.

But she wasn't here.

Max had practically given him a time out, banished him to the park bench to consider his options while he took Christine on another tour of the park.

"Are you and Tempe going to be okay?"

That was the second big question, wasn't it? He's been pissed off with her in the past, frustrated with her, annoyed with her, but had he ever felt this way about her?

Fearful and frustrated and angry and worried and. . . what? His emotions were at war and he couldn't quite sort them out. One minute he was scared to death she was lost or hurt or trapped someplace and the next he was furious with her for abandoning him and not trusting him enough to take care of her.

That much he had sorted out. Everything else just muddied the battlefield.

The closest he could come to trying to sort out how he felt involved more muddying—revisiting his time with Hannah and the year he and Bones hadn't talked after that first case. Yet neither time prepared him for these feelings. He could throw in the sum total of their time as partners into the mix—Tessa and Sully and Cam and Gormogon and Taffet and Epps and misunderstandings and squintiness and fake deaths and Fat Pam—and nothing, nothing could have prepared him for what he was feeling now.

"You ready to go?"

Max had appeared at his side and he looked up at the old con with his daughter in his arms and he wondered if it was love or respect he felt for the man or abject hate and rage for stealing away his girls for the summer?

He smiled at Christine and took her as Max settled into the seat beside him.

"I've checked all the markings and if Tempe comes she'll know to go directly to the house."

The man had revived an old code used by hobos during the Great Depression to leave messages to his daughter in public places. They could leave the park and go back to the house Max was renting and know that if she got to the park she would know where to go next, that it was safe, her daughter was well, that Max was well.

But she wasn't here.

The war of emotions he could quell when Christine was in his arms. If all he did was concentrate on her, the emotions could be held at bay until night, when he put her to bed and the emotions returned like rampaging demons to disrupt his sleep and to destroy whatever balance he had gained in holding his child.

"Christine needs to be fed, don't you baby cakes?"

His daughter returned his smile and for the moment all was well.

But moments of peace lasted only so long. A glance at Max told him just how worried the man was, just how much he feared that he had somehow gotten his daughter killed just the same way he had gotten his wife killed.

And as horrible a burden _this_ was, _that_ had to be just as terrible.

oOo

"Exploding cantaloupes and greasy spot fungus on the man's shoes."

Cam Saroyan hugged herself and took several cleansing breaths before she allowed herself to look at the assembled scientists in front of her. "We have the injuries from the small explosion which gives us cause of death, but we have a mysterious fungus on the victim's shoes that has been identified, but not explained as to how it got there."

She continued listing the evidence they had and what it might mean, but she wondered if this case would only go into storage with the other cases that seemed to be the handiwork of Pelant.

". . . We have a significant amount of evidence that I have requested from the FBI lab on Agent Flynn's death." She took a deep breath and tried not to really see the reactions of her people. It was far easier to control her own emotions when they weren't sullied by others. "I would like us to see if there are any similarities between Sim's murder and Flynn's death."

She allowed herself to see the skepticism in the eyes of the people assembled on the platform, but she tried to look at their faces with a detachment that she seemed to have lost in the last day or so. "We need some answers, people, so let's get going."

The techs scattered first, leaving the core of people who had the most to gain or to lose if they couldn't find a connection between Pelant and the murders.

"How'd you get the FBI to hand over the evidence?" Hodgins asked first. "Weren't they convinced that Flynn's death was an accident?"

"Yes," she said, her whole body affirming the FBI point of view. But the mantra that had given her hope, kept her from toppling over the edge of moral and legal certainty in Sweets' office kept repeating itself in her head: _Pelant is only human; humans make mistakes._ "Agent Shaw discovered that the elevator had been serviced the week earlier and the supervisor for the building's maintenance crew has been in Boston for his daughter's wedding and couldn't possibly have ordered the stops to have been removed."

There was something about their reaction that gave her a sense of strength.

"The FBI is looking at the computer trail, even as we speak," she continued. "But they want us to be redundant, look at everything including the particulate evidence on the body and at the scene."

"Because we can do it better," Hodgins said.

There was fierce determination in his attitude, the kind of arrogant self-confidence that she had come to know from her people. The arrogance had been well-earned—they were good, damned good.

"We can add our expertise to theirs."

The slow grin from Hodgins reassured her. But Angela's expression seemed more guarded, cautious.

"I take it that we're going to have Agent Flynn's body sent here," Dr. Edison suggested.

A short shake of her head gave him his answer, but she elaborated. "We can look at the autopsy report as well as have access to all the X-rays and tests." She had won a small battle at the FBI. "If we find anything suspicious, we will have access to the remains." She looked at both Hodgins and Edison. "Everything will be delivered within the hour."

The two men headed toward their work, Hodgins to his lab, Edison back to the bone room leaving Cam with Angela who looked troubled.

"So, I'm not needed."

"Au contraire," Cam said, her confidence growing slowly. "I want you to look for places in the D.C. area that might have the fungus found on Sims' shoes. Plus you're needed to help design an experiment in which a cantaloupe is made into a bomb using common household materials."

Angela's confusion flickered for a moment. "We already know what went into the bomb. Hodgins already did that."

"But we'll need to know if Pelant had those materials," Cam countered. "We have a year's worth of delivery invoices from Sims' routes and we have a partial inventory of some of the devices and toys that Pelant has thanks to Agent Flynn's notes."

Angela brightened. "You want me to compare the bomb bits and pieces to what Pelant had delivered as well as to what he might own."

Cam pursed her lips. "I know it's a stretch, but I want us to stretch as far and and hard as we can on this one."

As she watched Angela make the trek back to her office, she closed her eyes and repeated the mantra that seemed to be holding her together and giving her hope: _"Pelant is human; humans make mistakes."_

oOo

The truck was gone.

She should have expected it. Ever since the flat tire, she'd seemed to have broken through the wall between herself and the Vasquez family. The children shyly talked to her in Spanish and Sra. Vasquez had asked her if she had children. Sr. Vasquez had even thanked her.

And now they left her.

She'd simply gone into the restroom of a rural gas station and come out to find the truck pulling out. Somehow, she could not fault their logic in leaving.

At least they had left her the backpack.

It was inconvenient, true. She was at a gas station located at a crossroads surrounded by cornfields far from even a small town. The map in the station, however, showed she was less than 50 miles from her daughter and her father.

Certainly she felt somewhat foolish having been lulled into a sense of complacency in regards to the Vasquez family. She'd managed to fashion a cast for Sra. Vasquez that would last her the 6 to 8 weeks the arm needed to heal and she had thought, incorrectly, that that would have earned her some goodwill. If her father had been with her he might have seen this coming. But she was not a student of human psychology and she would never presume to understand people's actions, but she understood the strong sense of self-preservation that had compelled the family to leave her here in the middle of farm country. By leaving her here, they could go there—wherever their _there_ was—without a witness.

For the briefest of moments she was consumed with self-pity, then an emotion verging on anger, but she just as quickly dismissed that feeling in favor of pure, unadulterated reason:

_She was only 47 miles from where her father had told her he would be with Christine._

_She had almost $60—probably enough for food and shelter (if she could find a motel in the area) and a phone call to her father. _

_That is, if she could borrow a phone. The tall, lanky clerk in the gas station had seemed more intent on some video game on his cell phone than on their odd little group._

All in all, while it was not an ideal situation, it certainly was not hopeless or desperate. She simply needed to go inside the gas station and ask the clerk to use a phone. If he was anything like Booth or Parker in his game playing, she might have to wait for the end of a set or a scrum or whatever, but this close to Christine and Max, she could show a bit of patience as well as a bit of the acting skill she'd been developing these past few months.

So Temperance swung the pack onto her back and considered how Wanda or Roxy would handle this situation.

oOo

This phone call woke him well past midnight, when exhaustion had finally worn down thought and given him a few moments of sweet oblivion in the form of dreamless sleep.

"Agent Booth?"

Wendell Bray was not a regular caller, even as a fellow player on their hockey team, and it took him several seconds to place the voice.

"Wendell," he growled, "what the hell's going on?"

Whether it was the hour or the sluggishness of a brain shifting gears from sleep to wakefulness, he had to ask the young man to repeat his message.

"Dr. Brennan was arrested for Ethan Sawyer's murder."

He named a town Booth had never heard of.

"The warrant was vacated, Wendell." Despite the fact that he was slowly catching up to the information from the young squintern, he knew that to be true.

"I don't know that they got the information out there, Booth," he said. "I'm just relaying information that we got from the Brennanites." He took a deep breath and repeated the information.

Hope was pushing aside the grogginess of sleep and he practically sprang from bed and tried to put on his pants with his free hand. "I just go over to this place. . . ."

"Rockville. . . ."

". . . And let them know they made a mistake and pick up Bones."

A kind of giddiness was forming deep in his gut and he felt like grabbing up Christine from her crib and tearing through the countryside to go rescue his partner.

"She's not there."

Again, it felt like his brain was a step behind everything that Wendell said.

"What do you mean, 'she's not there?'" he asked. "She's got to be there. What did they do, transfer her to a bigger jail?"

With one hand he held his jeans up while he tucked the phone into the crook of his shoulder.

"She was arrested in Rockville on the murder charges," Wendell said. "One of the Brennanites lives in the area and went down to the jail to serve as her attorney, you know, keep an eye on her until this could all be straightened out."

Four out of the four Brennanites he had met in the past had either been murderers or a nutty stalker, so he tried not to dwell on that image.

"So they transferred her to a bigger facility," Booth said. "It happens all the time. Sometimes those small jails aren't anything more than a room with a lock."

"But they arrested her for Dr. Sawyer's murder."

That, too, could be explained away—small towns didn't always get the arrest bulletins in a timely manner.

"The thing is, Booth, she's gone."

"You just said they transferred her," Booth corrected.

"No," Wendell protested, "that's not what happened." He paused. "Well, it is. But the thing is, she got arrested in one place and now she's not there."

"She's disappeared."


	15. Phase 15

**Phase 15: Paper Locks**

_**A/N:**__ A big thank you to __**casket4mytears**__ for pointing out that my method of killing off Flynn was flawed. While I don't think I've "fixed" the problem completely, I am using some of the ideas she offered to help shape the story._

_**Petuniatc**__ was responsible for originally mentioning the Brennanites who have their own part to play in this little drama._

_And again, thank you to all those who have read, reviewed (I guess it's commented, now) and put this on alert. I hope the story is living up to your expectations. _

oOo

This time he was the one making phone calls.

He woke up Hacker. Woke up Shaw. Hell, he'd wake up every damn agent in the bullpen for research assistance if need be.

He talked to the Brennanite-stalker-wannabe for the details that Wendell hadn't given him over the phone, but even then the information had been sparse: One minute she was arrested and in some jail cell in some Podunk little town and the next she was gone.

He tried to wake up the goddamned sheriff of that little town, but he kept getting endless ringing or some such nonsense and it didn't help that he had insisted on driving and Max had insisted on coming and Christine was fussing in the back of the car and he didn't know why but this was one cruel-ass joke to be playing on him—_on them_—right now.

Christine sent up a wail of protest and with the car seat facing backwards, it was impossible to see her and gauge what the problem was.

"Stop."

Max had unclicked his seatbelt and was trying to make the climb into the back, but he was an old man and he certainly wasn't spry enough—_where the hell did he get the word, spry_—to make it back there.

"Just stop the car, Seeley, and I'll take care of Christine."

Lucky the old con man had the car all set for a fast getaway—clothes and food and towels and diapers—and lucky that Booth needed him.

"You're not going to just leave me by the side of the road?"

He eased the piece-of-shit sedan onto the shoulder of the road, letting the semi that had been tailing them scream past.

Max gave him a look and then opened the door and for a brief, delicious moment, Booth considered flooring the car and taking off and leaving the old reprobate dangling on the side of the road in the dark.

Yeah, he was building up a healthy unhealthy anger.

The slam of the back door was the signal to begin the race again and he managed to push the car fast, its growl of protest louder than Max's grunt.

With one eye on the rearview mirror and the other on the road, he pushed the car faster. If he could make 50 miles in an hour, then he'd cut the time in half at a 90 mph clip.

But the scene in the backseat gave him pause and he eased up on the accelerator and found a speed that didn't agitate his daughter nearly as much, one that didn't trigger his guilt.

He punched in the sheriff's number again, then tried 911. The operator, greeting him professionally clipped tones, listened as he explained what he needed.

"Rockville doesn't have a jail, sir."

"Then how the hell does someone get arrested there?"

Christine was offering up a steady staccato of cries despite Max's murmurs of reassurance.

"There's a county sheriff who covers Rockville. There's a holding cell in the basement of the courthouse."

He growled out a request for the sheriff's number and punched it in.

"Maybe I should talk to the police." Max had quieted Christine who was, from the look of things, drinking from a bottle. "You seem angry."

"I'm agitated," he protested. "Agitated. You know, when your partner is arrested for a crime she didn't commit based on a warrant that is no longer valid."

The number gave way to that damned ringing and he immediately slammed his fist into the steering wheel. By all rights, it probably should have shattered under the force of his blow, but it only shuddered its protest.

Max, who, like his daughter had an opinion about everything, registered his latest. "I think Pelant had a hand in this."

"Couldn't just be some bureaucratic gobbledygook? Some god awful glitch?" He could hear the sarcasm scraping the insides of the car. "Some sheriff department screw up?"

"I'd take any of those over Pelant."

Booth only gritted his teeth.

"This is getting to be a bit like 'The Perils of Pauline.'"

"What?"

"It was an old silent movie serial. The heroine is in an almost constant state of danger until the last minutes of the reel."

He had half a mind to tell Max what he thought of his movie choices, but the Rockville exit was coming up and he only grunted as he pulled the car onto the ramp. The road was like a washboard against the tires of the car and he slowed down even more to ease the rocking in the car.

Christine was protesting the trip in short bursts and he wondered if maybe he'd been too hasty in ordering Max to come along.

"I'm going to call Russ," Max announced from the back. "I thought this Rockville doesn't have a sheriff's office."

He'd announced what he had learned like he would with Bones or Sweets. "They have a town commissioner or something. They have a county sheriff. Deputies, the works. Civilization, Max."

"It's not very civilized if they arrest someone on a warrant that doesn't exist."

He exhaled loudly, the effort to converse too much right now.

"They don't get the news that she's no longer a suspect so they arrest her anyway." Max couldn't take a hint and stop talking. "The arrest triggers something, alerts Pelant. He then creates some kind of bureaucratic labyrinth to move Tempe through until she's lost in the system and we're wasting hours looking for her in one dead end after another."

Yeah, the old man couldn't stop talking.

But it didn't stop Booth from thinking the man could be right.

oOo

A good night's sleep, a call from Michelle and all was right with the world, thought Cam. Well, maybe not all right but a far sight better than yesterday. She had what looked like a full house in the lab—FBI techs next to their Jeffersonian counterparts and machines buzzing and beeping to mark their progress.

Because they were making progress.

It had taken her some time to understand the Jeffersonian way of doing things. Correction; _the Brennan way_ of doing things. At first she thought the woman was all about research, but it turned out that looking at everything in a case and then figuring out how it all fit together was a good way to work a murder case. It meant that even the smallest detail earned some and sometimes it had been the smallest of small that had helped break a case wide open.

And that was what they were doing—looking at everything. _Everything_.

"Dr. Saroyan?"

While she felt better, Wendell looked a bit like she had felt yesterday. "If you're not feeling well, Mr. Bray, I think we can cover for you today."

"No, that's not it, Dr. Saroyan." He looked positively pained. "Daisy got a hit with the Brenannites late last night and I passed the information along to Agent Booth."

His expression said it all. "It's not good news." She felt her optimism fading.

"It's not good or bad news, Dr. Saroyan. It's mostly just confusing."

She listened as he detailed what had happened and she was half-tempted to pull out her cell phone and call Booth for an update.

"Should I tell the others, or are you going to?"

It was a simple question, but one that still had a myriad of ramifications. "I will, Mr. Bray," she said, adding, "eventually."

"I know that Hodgins was there when I mentioned the Brennanites," he countered. "And Angela? She's been sick with worry about Dr. B."

In the scheme of things, she didn't see any harm with waiting a couple of hours until they had some positive news. But Wendell being Wendell was enough to win her over.

"I will tell the others," she finally agreed. "But I would appreciate it if you would keep this between us. We don't know what's going on and with Booth looking, he should be able to straighten it out soon."

He nodded, still not convinced, but she had decided to follow a specific course of action: what mattered right now were the investigations.

With her heels firmly clicking against the floor, she made her way into the Ookie room. "I was wondering if you have anything new for me, Dr. Hodgins."

There was that glimmer in his eyes that she'd seen hundreds of times—this had to be good.

"The greasy spot fungus I found on the bottom of Sims' shoes is the same greasy spot fungus found on the bottom of Flynn's shoes. Same strain."

She could have hugged him. "Which means that Sims and Flynn crossed paths somehow with this fungus."

"More than that, it gives the FBI a reason to go back to Pelant's place and maybe search for the source of the fungus since Agent Flynn had questioned him."

She was not a woman given to believing in magic, but she was a woman beginning to believe wholeheartedly in the mantra she'd adopted yesterday: Pelant is human; humans make mistakes. It was not poetic or even catchy, but it was true and getting truer all the time.

"I'll inform the FBI."

Then he stopped her. Asked her if she knew what was wrong with Wendell and any hope of holding onto the latest news about Brennan was lost.

"We shouldn't jump to conclusions," she finished after she detailed the latest news on Brennan. "This is Booth and Brennan."

But each word seemed to dull hope. She'd explained what little she knew and noted that it had been late last night when the arrest was made and hoped that she could replant a seed of possibilities because she did not want to consider the reality.

But Hodgins did that for her. "She's what? A few hundred miles away? They might not be as willing to accept mindless orders from faceless drones."

Despite everything, she smiled. "I hope you're right, Dr. Hodgins. I hope you're right."

oOo

"It's murder," she announced as he turned from his desk. "Special Agent Flynn's death is officially a murder."

Dr. Lance Sweets spun his chair around. "Has his murder been tied into Derek Sims' murder?"

Special Agent Genny Shaw practically vibrated with the news. "No, but the Jeffersonian is looking for those connections."

Everything is so screwed up, he thought as he held back a fist pump. You just don't celebrate when someone's death is ruled a homicide., he reminded himself. But a murder investigation might turn up some new evidence that could bury Pelant. "How'd they figure that out?"

"Maintenance protocols," Shaw said. "They cut the power completely to any elevator that is under repair so that it can't be accessed. Someone had to manually restore power to that elevator car and remove the out of order sign on the 60th floor as well as make sure Flynn was in the elevator. It couldn't have been done by computer."

He leaned back in his chair. "So Pelant might not have done it."

"Agent Paretsky is keeping an open mind on the case," she said. "We're looking at the maintenance staff right now."

That's the best that he could hope for.

"There's more, Dr. Sweets." She hesitated and he feared the worst. "Dr. Brennan was arrested last night."

Detail after detail that Shaw then supplied didn't make sense.

"The warrant's been torn up," Sweets protested. "She isn't under suspicion of murder anymore."

Shaw looked on helplessly. "Agent Booth is going on information supplied by a group called, 'The Brennanites.' Apparently they've been monitoring police activity looking for Dr. Brennan."

He knew the partner's old cases and once he thought the Brennanites would make a fascinating paper on extraverted personality types. Now he just hoped that their neuroticism and borderline pathological behavior might actually protect Dr. Brennan. "And you only know that she was arrested and that she was there one minute and gone the next."

Shaw looked grim. "I have the field office assisting in tracking down any transfer orders between governmental agencies for women fitting her description." She looked at the paper in her hand. "In addition, there are at least 6 different prisons just in that state housing people Dr. Brennan helped put away. I've got calls into all of them as well, but it's still early."

"Pelant would try to bury her deep in the system." He felt the old rumblings of worry take hold. "I can help on this end. Make calls to psychiatric facilities in the state."

Shaw shook her head. "I started that last night when I got Agent Booth's call. I've probably woken up just about every director of every psychiatric hospital there." She paused. "Knowing Dr. Brennan's history, I don't know that she'd go easily. And Agent Booth? I don't think he's going to give up until he finds her."

He'd seen first-hand just how doggedly Dr. Brennan had tried to save Booth from the Gravedigger and he'd seen Booth shield Dr. Brennan from a madwoman. He knew what the partners were willing to do for each other. "Neither one of them is likely to give up."

Shaw gave him a small nod. "As long as both of them are fighting this, there's always a chance."

oOo

Angela felt that hollow ache take hold again, the one she had tried to sketch out as if to exorcise it. But no matter how many times she had tried, it had roared back to make her feel empty with all but grief.

"She's disappeared?"

Jack was holding her and Cam was looking on with a mixture of her own sadness and grief.

And then she snapped.

Well, it wasn't quite a break from reality, although there was a bit of that. And it wasn't quite as primal as anger, but there was a healthy dose of that as well.

"This isn't helping," she said. "This. . . this. . . this is wallowing."

"Ange. . . ."

But she stopped Jack before he said what she had expected him to say. Words of comfort. Positive words. Encouraging words.

Words were just that—words. Brennan had taught her that. Hell, life had taught her that. What they needed right now was action.

She stood from her stool and brushed off her skirt and squared her shoulders. "Dr. Saroyan, if you could get the computer records for the elevators in the Wieboldt, I'd like to examine them, maybe run them through Ethan Sawyer's program see how they were tampered with. And Jack?"

She saw it in his eyes, an understanding that she wasn't trying to escape from the comfort of his arms or his words, but that she needed to do something before fear and self-pity took over and ruled her.

"I've got to find some citrus trees in the area," he finished for her.

Cam put her own seal of approval on their renewed approach. "I've got toxicology reports to look at."

She could have clapped her hands like Cam did, pulled out a "let's get moving people," but it wasn't really about that. It was really about leaving no computer code unturned, about examining everything until they had run out of things to look at.

It was about honoring her friend by keeping the search alive no matter what.

"Then let's get to it."

oOo

The story was unbelievable, but knowing Bones, knowing just how squinty she was, he could believe it.

"I left her alone for only a second."

Bones would have pointed out that it had been for longer than a second, but he wasn't going to quibble like that. "Just go on."

"There was some kind of odor in the hallways, some kind of toxic smell and we evacuated the station," the officer was saying. "She was coughing and it was pretty bad; I thought she was going to die. So we transferred her to the hospital rather than take her to the Parkside Psychiatric Hospital."

Booth could practically envision the scenario. Bones was resisting arrest in the only way she knew how—she was sciencing her way out of jail, or in this case, a nut house. A glance at Max, sitting on the bench with a now-sleeping Christine slumped over his shoulder told him only one thing: Max was enjoying the fact that his straight-as-an-arrow, by-the-book daughter was bending the arrow and ripping apart the book at every chance.

He gulped down the coffee—hell, he was living off hope and liquid caffeine tracking a woman who has already been transferred from the arresting officer's custody to a state police station off the highway, then back to a county police lock-up in the space of 3-4 hours and had engineered her own trip to a hospital to disrupt the path that was being set for her.

"So she's gone," Booth said, fatigue beginning to win the battle against adrenaline. He rubbed at his forehead as if to wipe out the headache that seemed to be permanently parked there. "You what? Let her out of her restraints so she could go to the bathroom? What?"

The young officer just shook his head, embarrassment warring with frustration. "We took her to St. Joe's because Parkside doesn't have medical facilities. Figured she was being transferred there for some psych eval, you know, it happens. I was standing outside the curtain while the doc made the examination. We're supposed to have a female guard but I couldn't get hold of anyone, so I just left her handcuffed to the bed, and stood outside the curtain. She didn't seem like she was in any condition to get out of that bed much less escape."

Max's expression said it all—prideful glee that his daughter had outmaneuvered the police and hospital employees and was still on the run.

"So she cut herself?" Booth was trying to piece the story together, figure out what his next step was. Waiting at the rental house with Max was like sitting on a time bomb; he wasn't sure if either one of them could handle the wait anymore without tearing into each other. But tracking Bones was a lesson in diversion and subterfuge that might be a thing of beauty if it didn't also have the added problem of providing a way for her to end up getting herself hurt or killed because of some zealous cop.

He should have been happier—her acting _had definitely improved_.

"No, I. . . hell, I don't know. I went back into the room after the exam, the doc says wait right here, the nurse leaves and then there's blood all over." The young man paled at the memory. "One minute she's fine, sitting back in the bed and the next she's covered in all this blood."

"I thought she was like, hemorrhaging or something."

This was the part he couldn't quite fathom—had she cut herself? Induced some kind of squinty bleeding of some kind? Then to disappear like that?

Whatever it was, it had been effective. "I'm screaming for help, but no one's coming so I stepped out into the hall to flag someone down and when I went back in there. . . ."

"She was gone," he finished.

He heard Max's, "That's my girl," and felt torn over his own feelings.

"You checked the hospital? Everyone in and out?"

The young man nodded. "Problem is, we. . . I didn't check deliveries. Not right away." He hesitated and simply gave in and owned his mistake. "There were three in the hour after she went missing— laundry, pharmacy and food." He looked spent. "I'm sorry."

In his own way, so was Booth. He scanned the emergency room and tried to imagine where she would go, what she would do next. But as well as he knew Dr. Brennan the scientist, and Bones the partner and his lover and the mother of his child, he didn't know this Brennan—fugitive. He didn't know the woman who one minute could tell him that she loved him, that she was in _this_ with him because of him, and then drive off in the next minute without a backward glance.

She could be anywhere, injured or not. "Get someone to do a blood test," he said finally. "She's O something. If it's anything else, then we know she picked up some blood somewhere and made it look like an injury."

"It shouldn't have gone down like this," said the young cop. "I just left her for a second."

The young man headed toward the doorway and was soon swallowed up in a sea of blue. Booth looked toward Christine, still blissfully unaware of the drama around her.

Max shifted his granddaughter and gave him a narrowed look before closing his eyes and leaning his head against the wall.

Pulling out his cell phone, Booth dialed the one number he hadn't used that night.

"Cher? You better have a good reason for waking me now," she said. "Even natural beauties need a full eight hours."

He outlined what had happened and waited. The long silence on the other line made him wonder if maybe they had been disconnected.

"You think our computer creepazoid is behind this?" Caroline said finally. "Keeping alive arrest warrants when all he wants is your partner dead?"

She huffed and she puffed, but she promised to look into the problem and how far it extended, if she could. "And you damned well better catch up with her, cher. She's likely to piss off one of the locals and there's no telling what kind of damage could be done."

He thanked her and ended the call only to find Max by his side. "I'm going to go out for some air. There are just too many people around here."

He correctly interpreted "people" to be cops, but he couldn't argue with Max, it was crowded with people who didn't fully understand the situation. His badge had gotten him a ringside seat, but his back-up, an old man and a baby, had seriously compromised his authority. He watched as his daughter's head, nestled on her grandfather's shoulder, disappeared down the corridor.

Before he could go back to the nurse's station and begin his own questioning, his phone chirped and he fished it out of his pocket.

"Hey, Booth," Russ' voice broke through his over-caffeinated brain. "Tempe just emailed me."

oOo

It was easy enough to hide.

The police were scouring the hospital in a highly efficient manner that was also highly ineffective. If it truly were effective, then they would have found her in the women's shower rather than simply make the assumption that she was a doctor or nurse cleaning up after a shift. So, it was relatively easy: Hide in the shower under a spray of water; borrow scrubs from the supply closet to replace her well-used clothes; grab a hospital ID from one of the lockers.

And hide in plain sight.

Later, in her blue scrubs, she blended into the shadows of a patient's room during their latest sweep, the iPad she'd found on a bedside table substituting nicely for one of the tablets she'd seen at the nurses' station.

And she emailed her father.

All it took was a nod to the police officer checking the patient rooms on the floor, an examination of the patient's chart, the look of a medical professional. She'd worked with the police long enough to know that many were too quick to draw conclusions without sufficient evidence. Had she been charged with searching for an escaped prisoner, she would have tightened the search parameters and identified each person in the hospital. While it might have interfered with the various functions within the institution, she most definitely would have found her escapee.

She could practically hear Angela's voice in her head saying, "I'm glad you weren't in charge of looking for you," and she could almost hear her father's voice suggesting a different course of action.

But she would wait.

The police were practically congealing at the hospital entrances—that much she could tell from glances out the window. And while she definitely felt a heightened sense of fear and anxiety each time she encountered someone on the floor, she understood that her greatest challenge would be simply walking out the doors of the hospital. There the police were actually examining IDs and her choice—Magdelene Gruzlinski—did not come close to matching her own facial features.

So, she would wait.

The hospital provided food, clothing, places to sleep. She had access to phones and computers and all she had to do was avoid the search teams traversing the hospital and do nothing to suggest that Temperance Brennan was still inside.

That was easy enough.

She found her latest hiding place at the end of a hallway, the décor here far different than the clean institutional lines of the hospital. In the back of the room she located another locker room of a different sort and a new costume that just might help her escape.

oOo

"You know, Max, you could change her."

He grinned down at his daughter then placed a sloppy kiss on her belly eliciting a squeal of delight from Christine.

Splayed out on the changing table in the family bathroom, Christine was slowly becoming the little girl he had known—quick to smile and laugh, open with her affection. He murmured as he kissed a trail up from her belly button to her forehead, the action a familiar one that brought on another wave of happy squeals.

"You need time to bond with her again, you know," Max said as he handed him the baby powder. "She's really a pretty easy baby."

With a dash of powder and a few tickles along the way, Christine proved her grandfather's words, smiling and burbling, her fingers doing a constant dance with the air above her as Booth saw just how easily she was opening up to him again.

"Tempe's probably long gone by now."

Max had made that point before and now, five hours in. he could only agree with him.

"The email just said that she was all right," Max said as he took the baby from his arms and walked out into the hallway. "She wouldn't give away her location out of fear of who might be listening in."

The paranoia, if he could call it that, was well deserved. She had managed to make a huge detour from a mental health facility where God only knew what was in store for her. Caroline and Shaw were still compiling a map of where the arrest warrant was still valid, but it seemed simple—two hundred miles or so around D.C., she was in Pelant's territory, where the arrest warrant did not exist but the threat from the psychopath did. Outside that two hundred mile marker, she was fair game for the police who would be manipulated into delivering her over to some kind of horrible end.

He had managed to get a third, and probable final, search of the hospital, this time matching up personnel to their IDs and patients to admission records, but he didn't hold out much hope for finding her here. She had fooled them with a chemical spill and lots of someone else's blood—_they still hadn't figured out how she had done that_—slipped her handcuffs and, given just how smart she was (and how slow the original officer had been) she was probably halfway already to Max's safe house.

"There's a chapel here," he said tiredly. "I'd like a few minutes alone."

Max nodded. "I'll be down in the lobby. We can figure out our next move there."

He kissed his daughter and watched as Max made the now-too-familiar turn toward the front of the hospital.

He made his own trek to the elevators, the movements almost automatic—he'd been up and down the elevators all morning and he practically had the floor plan of the place memorized. Down the third floor hallway and to the right and there a statue of St. Joseph stood, his arms open as if to welcome a weary soul.

It was a Catholic chapel, complete with a large crucifix in the front of the room, candles on the side complete with a nun in traditional black garb in the middle row. Dipping his fingers into the Holy Water, he crossed himself and walked toward the front, kneeling at the communion rail and crossing himself again.

He'd prayed daily for his family to return, prayed for their safety, but today he felt as if he was out of prayers, yet he bowed his head over his folded hands and tried to clear his mind.

But it was little use. He offered up a Hail Mary and an Our Father before asking only that Temperance find her way home, find her way back to the baby and to him, find her way back to the people who loved her, before crossing himself and unfolding himself from the kneeler.

And all it took was a second.

In a second, the nun had launched herself into his arms and he was holding her as if she was his lifeline and he only pulled away for a moment to be sure it was her before clutching her again.

It would take several more seconds before he realized that as miraculous as it was, his prayer had been answered.


	16. Phase 16

**Phase 16: Paper Locks**

oOo

It took several minutes before his brain processed the fact that he was kissing a nun.

_This_ had never really been one of his fantasies even in Catholic school. He was a good Catholic—_mostly_ a good Catholic—and the woman in his arms was an atheist—an _incredibly_ vocal atheist—wearing the sacred robes of a nun and he was kissing her and holding her in a way that one did not hold a nun.

And just as his mind was processing that, Bones pulled away and he could study the face he'd been missing these last three months.

Her cheekbones were more pronounced revealing a small purple mark on her left cheek and her eyes somehow seemed bigger than he remembered. She wore no makeup which made her look young and vulnerable.

"I thought I lost you," he said simply, his right hand cupping her face, covering the slightly bruised flesh that was framed by the white coif.

The anger and worry and fear that had propelled him to track her movements had given way to relief and he was almost giddy with it.

But her mind, always working at the speed of light, was much too quick for him.

"I'd rather be arrested by you, Booth," she said, her voice husky. "I can give you directions on where to find Christine and my father."

"What? Wait," he sputtered, his thoughts finally catching up with hers. "Whoa."

He then gave her the Cliff Notes' version of how the lab had cleared her name, how Russ had helped find her father and the baby, how he'd been tracking her.

"It's over. I'm taking you home," he insisted. "You and Christine."

And then something odd happened. Perhaps it was the wariness he saw in her eyes, perhaps it was her posture, perhaps the anger and the worry and the fear hadn't quite left, but he threw in, "I'm not going to let you leave me again," and a dam inside him burst.

"Then you should let me go."

Later, much, much later, he would recall how she said the words rather than the words themselves and he would know what she meant by them, not what he thought she meant, but too many weeks apart and too many anxious moments gave way to the fury that was lurking beneath the surface of the calm he tried to present to the world these days.

"I'm not letting you do that," he said, the words savage and hard. "You're not going to do that to me again."

For some reason, the tone seemed familiar, and it took him seconds to realize that without the self-control he had mastered over the years, he was channeling his father's rage.

And she was ahead of him again, but this time she only had to state the obvious to set him off again. "You're angry."

This was not the time to pour out his own misery: how he hurt, how hard it had been for him, how difficult his life had been. But he did, anyway.

"Damn it, Bones. Your running away has never been good for us."

It was a short burst, but she stood still and strong and took it, her calm a stark contrast to his anger.

He half-expected her to punch back with a complaint about how damned long it had taken her team to do something—_anything_—to clear her name and bring her home.

But she took a step closer to him and wrapped a hand over his forearm while she placed the other flat on his chest.

"You should arrest me, Booth." She was standing there in front of him, the atheist wrapped up in the habit of a true believer, speaking to him with a cool head he had long since lost, telling him he should do the inconceivable, while a good part of him feared that if the hand of God had not already struck out at him for his past sins, then it just might be poised to slap at him for this, all this. "They're still looking for me."

oOo

"The FBI found a local source for your fungus."

She was bursting with the good news, certain that her face would give it away, but she didn't care. They deserved a bit of good fortune.

"Florida," Jack Hodgins said. "Specifically, Ellenton, Florida, where the fungus was responsible for the destruction of about a half dozen grapefruit trees before being brought under control." He looked up from his butterfly tank. "Grapefruit grows in Texas, Arizona, California, and closer to our neck of the world, Florida. But I haven't been able to locate any grapefruit trees in the area and certainly none that were affected by the fungus."

Dr. Camille Saroyan began again. "Local source. They found a _local_ source."

"Christopher Pelant's yard," he offered. "But we already knew that."

She sighed and rolled her eyes heavenward. In the company of genius, she sometimes felt she was a step or two behind. Dr. Jack Hodgins was giving her that squinty look. "We have evidence now," she continued. "Both Sims and Flynn had the same fungus on their shoes. Both of them were at Pelants'. Can we use that?"

"Someone had to introduce the fungus there. Greasy spot causes airborne ascospores to be produced in decomposing leaves," he explained. "Our warm, humid nights have been perfect for the fungus to grow, but how it got this far north is anyone's guess."

While she rarely ascribed such actions to a divine presence, she had offered up a little prayer of thanks for this one small step closer to nailing Pelant. "However the fungus got there, can you think of anything else we can do with this information? Any other way this fungus can help us because right now, it's just circumstantial and doesn't help prove that Pelant had anything to do with the deaths of either man.  
They just passed through his yard."

Years ago when she had taken the job at the Jeffersonian, she had merely considered it a step up from the basement morgues in which she had worked. But people like Jack Hodgins had made her realize long, long ago that she hadn't just taken a step upward, but she had reached a whole other level entirely. She was hoping to use that genius now.

"If you can get the FBI to loan us a few of their techs and lend me Wendell for the afternoon," he said, "I might be able to conjure up a bit more evidence."

oOo

". . . Killing remotely through the use of small explosive devices shows an impersonal almost clinical approach to murder. Initially, subject may have killed as a creative means of self-fulfillment, the result of boredom and frustration induced by a repressive society."

Dr. Lance Sweets switched off the recorder and laid it down on his desk and rested his head on his fist. He'd been awake since before dawn, making phone calls, trying to ensure that Temperance Brennan or any woman fitting her description would not go unknown in any psychiatric hospital from Washington to Chicago. It was a small favor for the partners, a baby step in a series of baby steps that might just help save Dr. Brennan.

And Booth.

He hesitated then reached for the notepad that held a collection of thoughts on the partners and their complicated, sometimes convoluted relationship. He'd played with the idea of reworking his book on them, even going so far as to add chapters that chronicled the post-Maluku/Afghanistan changes complete with Booth's relationship with Hannah Burley and later, the new dynamic between the partners-turned-lovers.

And now this.

He blew out his breath and flipped through the pages, stopping on one in which he had written, "TRUST." The page was alive with circles and arrows like a roadmap of each case and how their deep and abiding trust had allowed them to work it. He had thought of reworking the entire book around that theme, exploring how outside forces had never quite been able to derail the partnership. The Brodsky case had figured heavily in that decision, but like all decisions on the book, he had abandoned that as well.

It was difficult to think of Booth and Brennan as merely subjects—they were his colleagues and, most importantly, his friends. He'd seen the cracks that had developed after their travels abroad, had practically held his breath as Dr. Brennan had seemed to become lost in the Lauren Eames case, had wondered if they would get past the rift caused by Jacob Brodsky's presence.

And now?

He had not expected Dr. Brennan to run. The idea that she would repeat her parents' actions, the same actions that had made her fearful of close relationships, had seemed impossible. But people could still surprise him; Dr. Brennan could still surprise him.

But her decision now involved more than just the good doctor.

He tossed the notepad to the side of his desk and yawned. If he were to put himself into Dr. Brennan's mindset, he could see just how rational it had been for her to run with the baby: she would save herself, save the baby, allow Booth to remain with the FBI. She had saved Booth even though, all along, it had looked like she was the one most in need of saving.

It would have destroyed Booth to lose her or the baby, and in turn, Booth would have killed or tried to kill Pelant.

And the Seeley Joseph Booth they knew would be no more.

He was still trying to wrap his shrink brain around the motivations of Christopher Pelant. Why had he targeted them? Why now? On the surface, it seemed easy enough to explain—the team of Booth and Brennan and the Jeffersonian was certainly one of the best at solving murders. Dr. Brennan's IQ was in the same stratosphere as Pelant's, so she was a unique challenge.

The why was the key question in his mind and it went deeper than some intellectual game for Pelant to prove his superiority. Dr. Brennan and the Jeffersonian could find the who, what, where, when and how, but he really needed to know the why.

Perhaps it was the fact that he had been up for hours or that he was worried that despite all of his efforts, Booth might still be unable to save the woman he loved and in her loss would become another casualty of Christopher Pelant's sick mind. Perhaps his tired mind was simply jumbling unanswered questions from one case with another.

Perhaps.

But maybe in the end he had to thank time spent with Jack Hodgins for the idea, a conspiracy theory to beat all conspiracy theories—perhaps Christopher Pelant was targeting them as some kind of game of twisted revenge for the death of Heather Taffet.

He almost laughed; he was spending entirely too much time with Hodgins.

Oh, but he could build a case however sketchy.

Heather Taffet had needed someone with computer and electronic skills to effectively disguise her voice or construct her stun gun. She had needed someone to help drag a 180 lbs. Booth from his apartment. Compare Heather Taffet's timeline with Christopher Pelant's, and the coincidences were too stark to ignore.

He rubbed at his eyes trying to rub away the thought. The Taffet case had been focused on her, just her because anything else would have clouded their true objective: to end the Gravedigger. Everything else had been secondary given how thin their evidence became.

Sweets pushed himself away from his desk and stood trying to push away the thoughts as well. He was diving into something else entirely, something that only complicated an already complicated situation and called into question his own professional judgment.

He could practically hear Hodgins waxing poetic about the possibilities inherent in a Gravedigger-Pelant pairing, while the more rational—definitely saner—Dr. Brennan would be asking him to present his evidence.

He had no evidence only supposition muddied by too little sleep and too much worry. Maybe he was just trying to avoid the real dilemma (not one engendered by a lack of caffeine): by running from Pelant, Dr. Brennan might have saved herself and the baby as well as Booth, but in the end, her actions might destroy the partnership with the man she loved.

oOo

"Caroline's going to see what she can do on her end."

He pocketed his phone and took in the scene. _Sister_ _Temperance_, as her father had dubbed her, was sitting in the front pew still dressed in the black and white habit of the church cradling Christine, Max seated next to them.

Their reunion was almost as fierce as his and Bones', Max pulling his daughter into a long, one-armed hug before relinquishing the baby to her embrace. But he hadn't handed over his stake in their present situation, demanding almost immediately after transferring the baby what their next move was.

"I've got it covered, Max. You've done enough." A thread of anger still colored the tone of his delivery. Max sat close to Bones who was being welcomed back by a very animated Christine who seemed to enjoy the attention of her mother. The baby was clutching at the crucifix around Bones' neck and suddenly he couldn't take anymore sure that St. Joseph himself might just march in there and demand the atheist take off the sacred robes of a nun. "Maybe you could find something else to wear there, Bones."

"Because these are the traditional garments worn by women who have taken a sacred vow of chastity to your God. . . ," she began.

"Couldn't you find something else to wear?"

His voice was sharp as he interrupted her, so sharp that it caught her attention, and rather than continue her explanation, she paused and gave him the look he had seen her give human remains.

And he looked away.

Christine seemed to sense the changing mood of the room and began a short, staccato burst of cries.

"She's hungry, honey," Max said. "I could go down to the car and get her some food. There's that suitcase in the trunk. I could bring you something to wear so Booth won't be so uncomfortable."

"I think I can feed her, Dad," she said as she stood. "There are some clothes in the back."

She made the walk to the back never really looking his way.

"It might be the only way she can walk out of here, Seeley," Max argued once she disappeared behind a closed door. "There's a whole gauntlet of police down there who have a piece of paper that says she should be arrested. They don't care if it's legal or not."

"Don't you think I know that?" he countered. "It's complicated by the fact that she escaped police custody. They're not going to forget that."

Max gave him a long, assessing look, one that seemed to run in the family. "So this is all Tempe's fault? You do know that if she hadn't escaped, she would probably be in some mental hospital being pumped full of drugs long before we could get her out. Or in some prison cell with someone bribed to kill her. Or so lost in the system that we would need bloodhounds to find her."

The thought had occurred to him along with other scenarios that had seen her injured or killed in one of a dozen or more ways. "We're going to do this my way, Max. This ends here and now."

The old con man grimaced and leaned back in the pew. "I hope you know what you're doing, Seeley."

He closed his eyes and called on every saint he could think of then began to dissect each word of the Serenity Prayer to calm the emotions roiling within him. Part of him wanted to pull Bones into his arms and never let her go, but that feeling was warring with the other part of him that wanted only to punish her for having hurt him so much. And there was the third part, the one that wanted desperately to gain the upper hand in this bizarre situation and end the stalemate so he could take his family home with him.

Thankfully, Max remained quiet, allowing him to find a small island of inner peace. When he looked up, having asked God to grant him the courage to change the things he could and the wisdom to know the difference, Max's eyes were closed, and the old man had found his own path to serenity.

oOo

"You know this is like looking for a needle in a haystack." Angela stood just inside the elevator and shone the light on the floor of the hallway. "Or should I say, it's like looking for a fungus in a 60-story building?"

But Jack wasn't deterred by her negativism. "That is why we're looking in the most logical places for the fungus." He peered at the floor with his colored goggles and shook his head. "It's not here."

"Going up," she announced as she pressed the button and the doors began to close. "Just 59 more floors to go."

She didn't mind fieldwork, not really. And getting out of the lab into the real world meant that she was out of contact with the updates coming from the Brennanites via Daisy Wick who seemed determined to keep the news flowing despite the fact that there was little news. Brennan had been arrested, transferred and then somehow had slipped from police custody and now authorities were focusing their search in and around a hospital in some town up north.

"Wendell and the FBI techs are looking at the access points for computer control of the elevators as well as any mechanical sites," Jack said. "We just ride the elevators."

She smiled despite herself. Jack could get enthusiastic about everything. While the best part of the trip—besides hitting a news blackout just by being out of the lab and being with her husband and his odd joys—was knowing she was doing something, anything, to help. The FBI was still holding onto Flynn's remains and had only doled out bits and pieces of information making any investigation into his death frustrating. Combined with the drama up north and she had practically jumped at the chance to don her Jeffersonian jumpsuit and ride an elevator all afternoon.

"I shine my special color light, you look at the floor with your special color glasses and we both pretend it's just a normal day."

He might be King of the Lab and a mad scientist, but he was also King of her heart because he knew her so well.

"Ange?" He pressed the stop button on the elevator. "Remember what Brennan always says?"

"'Let's just work?'" She pointed her chin toward the button. "You know that's going to sound an alarm in about 60 seconds."

"No," he said as he pressed the button and the elevator began to move. "She says it's useless to speculate. And in this instance, I think you should take that advice."

She gave him a look. They'd had this conversation dozens of times over the last few weeks and while she knew in her heart that he was right, it never quite erased the worry. She sighed. "So we find fungus on one of the floors and what? We trace it back to Pelant?"

"Maybe," he said.

"That's reassuring."

He said nothing as they checked the next floor.

She finally broke the silence on the next floor. "This feels like none of the other cases we've worked."

He gave her that sideways glance of his and she wondered if he felt the same way.

"I mean we usually get a handle on the case by now. We usually have something, Jack."

"And usually someone hasn't been accused of a horrible murder. Usually we have Booth working the case with us. Usually, we have the entire team."

She didn't know if he was agreeing with her or challenging her, so she dropped her point for another. "I don't know how a couple gets past something like this. One of them takes off for months and then three months later you do what? Pick up your life like nothing happened?"

That stopped him. "Ange, why are you so worried about this? If Booth succeeds in bringing Brennan home in one piece, they'll work it out. They've worked out everything in the past."

She wanted to point out the long drawn out courtship that had been 7 years in the making had been anything but simple, yet she didn't need to tell him the story he had been witness to. "What would you do if I took off for three months and then came home with Michael?"

"I'd ask if you picked up my pretzels," he joked. But when she gave him her look, he took her point seriously.

"Angie, baby, they're going to work it out," he said. "But first, let's let Booth bring her home."

"You're right," she said as the door opened on the elevator and she shone her light. "I should worry about that when we've got something to worry about."

But his silence triggered the worry that was badly hidden these days. "What? What is it?"

He straightened and smiled at her. "We know someone who walked through Pelant's yard also walked onto this floor."

"It could be Flynn," she said. "Maybe he got off on the wrong floor."

"No," Jack said. "It doesn't fit the timeline that the FBI gave us." He pulled out his phone. "Wendell, do you have the floor plan for the sixth floor?"

She listened to a one-sided conversation mostly consisting of ah-huhs. She drew in a deep breath and decided that she was going to spend an extra hour practicing yoga if only to ease some of the worry that she just couldn't shake.

"Got it, Wendell," Jack said then pocketed the phone. "Someone with greasy spot fungus was on this floor," he repeated. "We might have a welcome home present for Dr. B."

oOo

"Can't you simply claim sanctuary or something?" Max asked. "We are in a church, of sorts."

The old con had given him almost 20 minutes of blissful silence only to open his eyes and ask him the impossible.

"Sanctuary for criminals was abolished by King James I in 1623," Brennan said as she emerged from the back room. "I don't qualify for political sanctuary, Dad."

She was dressed in blue scrubs, her hair—much longer and darker—was tied back in a loose ponytail. He caught her eyes and tried to read her expression. But it was guarded, uncertain and he knew he was to blame for part of that.

Christine was slumped across her shoulder, drowsy from lunch and only putting up a small protest against sleep. Bones rubbed the baby's back and murmured to her, swaying gently, the effect hypnotizing to an infant with a full belly. "Did Caroline call?"

He shook his head, uncertain if he'd be able to speak without using each word to bring her pain.

"If there's a priest's outfit back there, I could walk you out of here, honey. They aren't likely to stop two people when they're looking for just one."

"No." He pulled his phone from his pocket and only glanced toward Bones and her father. The guarded expression was back with Bones, but Max was practically squinting at him. He checked his messages and tried to keep from re-dialing Caroline's number.

"We need to have a contingency plan," Max continued. "For all you know, Caroline will want you to turn her over to the local police."

"That's not happening," he growled. "Caroline's been through her own hell because of this case and she's not going to let Bones fall through the cracks."

It was the most he'd said and he noticed the look of interest on Bones' face.

But Max wasn't giving up. "There are always places that the cops miss. You could hide in the elevator shaft for a day or two. I remember doing that. . . ."

"No," he repeated. "No."

"I'd really like to go home, Dad."

She was looking at him when she said it, stopping the swaying only momentarily, her eyes pleading, before shifting the baby to her other shoulder.

He held her eyes for a moment and tried to look past the pleading to see if she really understood what her leaving had done. But his phone chirped and he fished it out of his pocket.

"Booth."

It was the call he had been waiting for, but not the answer he had expected. He asked Caroline to repeat the instructions before giving up after her second try and putting her on speakerphone.

"You need to act like the playground bully here, Booth and let the federal government take over jurisdiction on this case, Cher. All the other charges will just fall away."

"Meaning what?" Max asked.

"Meaning," said Caroline, "Booth needs to arrest Dr. Brennan."

oOo

She watched him for several miles, the set of his jaw, the line of his shoulders.

His earlier embrace and kiss had eased her own fears somewhat, given her hope that he still loved her. Almost every day that she had been gone, she had hoped he had thought out her actions rationally and had come to the same conclusion she had months earlier—to run from the warrant for her arrest would keep her and the baby safe until such time as her team could determine the truth.

It had been her hope—as irrational as hope might be. But after his initial reaction a strange silence seemed to envelope the space between them, and she let go of the hope that they could resume their lives before everything had been pulled apart. Hours later, she now wondered if she could actually believe that he had embraced her or kissed her because now he seemed like a stranger; the only thing she could be sure of was the anger radiating off him as he drove them toward Washington.

"I'm sorry," she said in the growing gloom of the car. "I'm sorry for taking Christine away from you, Booth."

She hadn't had an opportunity to apologize before, not really. He'd escorted her from the hospital to a police station where the transfer became official, then they had separated from Max and the baby to make the journey home in a rental car arranged by the Bureau, her father and the baby trailing them in his sedan.

Max being Max had kissed her and whispered, "Talk to him, honey," before leaving her alone with Booth.

But every start to a conversation was met with stony silence and being alone with Booth felt like being alone with a stranger.

She'd submitted to the arrest, submitted to the hour or so of wrangling between law agencies, submitted to being folded into the car handcuffed, separated from her father and from Christine again only because this was the only way she could go home.

And she wondered if she had lost her right to have a home with Booth.

"I'm sorry I hurt you, Booth," she said before a wave of guilt slammed into her and she fought the urge to cry.

"Are you hungry?" he asked. "Do you need something to eat?"

He had swiveled his head to look back at her and she could see his look, wild, almost manic, as if he were fighting his own war with emotion.

She murmured, "No, I'm fine," and studied the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders from her position in the rear seat. "I can wait."

Then silence.

Miles of silence.

She leaned her head against the window and tried to concentrate on something, anything other than the unspoken emotions between them. But she understood his pain, understood how it was to watch someone she loved drive off and leave her behind, understood how fear and worry coalesced into anger.

She understood just how deep the pain and the anger went.

He had helped her forgive her father, helped her have a relationship with a man who had essentially forged a life out of lies. Booth was the person to ask about how to fix this, how to find forgiveness. Booth had been the architect of rebuilding her relationships with her brother and her father. He had made her believe she could open her heart to another person and because of him, she had come to know and to trust love.

But the one person she could ask for help was the same person she had hurt so badly that he would not talk to her. So she sat in a car filled with his angry silence as they made their way toward home and an uncertain future together.

oOo

**A note:** Next week I'm on the road and then it's back to work I go so updates might be a bit spottier than usual. My hope is to wrap this up well before Season 8 begins. (Then we'll see how it's supposed to go for our hapless heroes.)


	17. Phase 17

**Phase 17: Paper Locks**

oOo

It was the shriek heard 'round the lab.

Camille Saroyan half-wondered if Daisy Wicks could wake the dead with that voice because she certainly had the ability to bring everything and everyone in the lab to a screeching halt.

As if to prove her point, somewhere in the lab, someone had upset a metal table and dozens of metal instruments clattered to the floor, providing a period to the exclamation point of Miss Wicks' voice.

"She's coming home," Daisy was practically hyperventilating as she repeated Cam's words. "Dr. Brennan is coming home."

There was a smattering of applause, a cheer or two around the platform, but nothing quite like Daisy's reaction.

"I knew we could pull it off and bring her back home," Daisy asserted.

Wendell Bray who had had his own small part to play only grinned then went back to his work.

"Did anyone else feel the ground move when she made that sound?" Dr. Clark Edison asked as Miss Wick took her hyperactive glee off the platform and to the Bone Room. "That woman's voice should be registered as a weapon."

As with all things Daisy Wicks, Cam tried to focus on her accomplishments as a scientist and tried—sometimes vainly—to ignore the arrogance of youth. "She's young," she countered.

"She's a 7.5 on the Richter Scale."

She listened for any sign that his comments were more than just a commentary on Miss Wick, but Dr. Edison bent back to the skeleton on the table.

"I've found nothing to counter Wendell's assessment that all of the injuries to Sims were caused by the explosion. "

"So essentially he became chopped salad," Cam murmured.

Something about the day and the death invited black humor.

"Has the Jeffersonian board changed their minds on Dr. Brennan?"

_There_, she thought. _There_ was the twinge of concern in Dr. Edison's voice that she had been expecting since she had let him know that Dr. Brennan was located and safe.

"There's still nothing official," she said, "but I've been asked by more than one of the board members for my opinion."

"They weren't asking before?"

It was of many aspects of being the boss that she didn't like—when the powers that be wanted to be rid of a problem, there was no wiggle room; when they wanted their star forensic anthropologist back—even tainted by her summer run, no less—they asked. Nicely. Very nicely.

"We still have work to do, Dr. Edison." She could obfuscate or misdirect, but Clark knew what she was doing. And she felt more than a tad guilty for taking the coward's way out. "The FBI is sending over all of the autopsy results and X-rays for us to look at on Agent Flynn."

He gave her a slight smile and a small nod before turning back to his work.

"Dr. Edison?"

He turned back to her and the speech she was about to deliver was cut short.

"Dr. Saroyan," he said, "I've enjoyed being here, but we both knew it was only temporary until Dr. Brennan would return." He turned back to the bones on the exam table. "In fact, I'm looking forward to having a bit more time for myself. Spend some time with my girlfriend, Nora. She says that since I've begun working here full-time that the hours are hard on a relationship."

He gave her a sideways glance and a bigger nod and had she not been on the platform in the middle of the Jeffersonian's Medico Legal Lab, she just might have broken down and hugged the man.

As it was, she simply returned his smile.

oOo

"Where do you want these, babe?"

Jack was peeking through two sprays of flowers that had practically filled up the back of her van and were now dwarfing him.

"Oh, here, Jack," she offered as she pried one spray from the crook of his arm. "Babe, you didn't have to bring them both in here at the same time."

Behind the flowers was a grinning Jack. "We've got six bags of groceries in your car. And we still have to get back to the lab before Cam calls."

She kissed him as best she could given the flowers between them. "They'll be home tomorrow and there can't be much in the refrigerator."

She kissed him again, the flowers seemingly bursting with fragrance as she leaned in. "It's been three months," she said. "They're going to want to stay in bed for three weeks."

He gave her that look—_that one_—which she always read as his "whatever Angie wants she gets." It was the look that he gave her when he thought her just a shade away from doing something crazy.

"The flowers go upstairs," she said. "You can make two trips."

He bent to put his flowers down and then pulled the vase from her arms. "Groceries first, then you can arrange the flowers upstairs."

He knew her all too well.

It took several trips to the van, but arranging the groceries in the refrigerator was easy enough; Booth had little more in there except a few bottles of beer and a carton of milk and a lone egg. There wasn't anything to say about that; they both knew just how hard it had been on him to be in the house alone and he had probably survived as much on take-out as on dinners at the diner.

That's why she was here creating a love zone here for her two friends. It was not entirely out of character—hadn't she organized everyone to welcome home Brennan and Booth when the baby was born?

This was different, of course, she thought as she passed a salmon steak to Jack who was arranging everything neatly in the freezer. But everything about this was different. Booth had passed through the summer as a ghost and Brennan had been MIA and no one really knew if they would ever be able to bring her home. And now that Brennan was coming home, Angela wondered what she was coming home to.

She folded a paper bag and stowed it with the others under the kitchen sink. "Flowers?"

Jack scooped up one vase and set it on the kitchen table. "Yes, my love," he said and kissed her cheek as he grabbed the second vase and she grabbed the last bag.

Upstairs was as tomblike as the rest of the house. They stockpiled the baby's room with diapers and wipes and a few of the other essentials. In the bedroom, Angela could tell exactly who slept where—Booth's side had an old wind-up clock on the nightstand while Brennan's had a digital clock set atop a pile of books.

It was _them_—the romantic and the pragmatic and while there was some doubt they'd ever get together as a couple, love had won out finally and they had been forging a life together until they weren't.

She felt odd here. The room was simple, not a grand master suite like she enjoyed at home with Jack. It had touches of both of them—small tapestries on the walls that were clearly Brennan, and the tallboy dresser that was definitely Booth. As much as she hoped, Angela wasn't sure that a few flowers or a full refrigerator would repair the damage. But she had chosen to welcome them home as best she could, providing sustenance and some small touches that might distract them from the three months apart.

Seven years of watching them had given her more than just a ringside seat; she knew them. The soft side of Brennan might just hide within her hard side making her almost impossible to reach, or the hard sides of both of the partners might collide and splinter their relationship.

But she could hope that love would keep them connected while they were sorting out the details.

Jack had already put some of the flowers in the bathroom and was now staring at the bed, the vase cradled in his arms.

She laughed. "We're not here to warm it up for them, Jack. We just turn down the bed. . . ," she reached for the blanket on Brennan's side, "and. . . ."

She did not finish, instead backing into the stack of books in the unfamiliar room and sending them and the clock crashing to the floor where it broke apart.

And what happened next was lost in a cloud of acrid smoke.

oOo

There was a new line.

They'd drawn so many over the years—lines created by lovers or circumstances or by their own stubbornness—that a line now shouldn't seem so difficult to navigate. But this one was wider than the meter between their beds at the motel and deeper than the guilt she felt.

She knew the damage she had done and she only added to it with words she had not known how to craft into something that would ease his pain.

Or hers.

They had been mostly silent on the drive and when he had signaled to turn off the highway, she had felt relief that finally she might be able to spend some time with her father or her daughter and not with the silent monolith that had become her partner.

And it had been tense—even she could feel the tension ratchet up as they ate at the small diner off the highway. Max had tried to buoy the conversation with comments on the area and weather, something he had done while they were on the road, something she appreciated more now than she had then. Booth had remained mostly quiet, talking mostly to Christine as he fed her from the small jars of baby food Max had brought in from the car.

It had been Max who had directed the conversation, Max who asked if there was a nice motel nearby, Max who had suggested Booth go out to the car and put the baby seat into his rental so that they could be back together as a family in one vehicle.

"Talk to him, honey," Max had advised. "Booth loves you. He just thinks he can protect you from everything and in some cases, he can't."

Her father had proven himself quite adept on how to handle people—hadn't he helped her hone her skills so that she could talk her way into that special library down in Florida?

Past actions predicated future results.

Or so she hoped.

Inside their motel room, she'd silently helped him put up the small crib and bathe Christine before putting her to bed.

Then she presented her argument: _it was the rational thing to do_.

Rational.

It was.

It really was.

Except it wasn't to Booth.

It wasn't rational at all to Booth.

And with her words she drew a new line.

oOo

"If you see Dr. Hodgins or Angela," Cam said, "could you let them know I'm looking for them, please?"

Wendell Bray practically saluted. "Will do, Dr. Saroyan."

"The FBI just picked up Christopher Pelant's shoes," she announced, the smile hard to hold back. "We need to analyze his shoes for the fungus that you and Dr. Hodgins were tracking down in the Wieboldt Building. We need to know if the patterns you found on the floor near the elevator controls match the pattern son the soles of Pelant's shoes."

It was a small victory, but she would take it, especially if it implicated Pelant and put him behind bars. Usually she could stay detached because Booth and Brennan confronted the suspects, but this time it was personal. Very personal.

"Just let me know," she repeated.

"Hodgins said they'd be gone for a couple of hours." He checked his watch. "They should have been back a while ago."

Knowing Hodgins and Angela, a couple hours could turn into four, especially if they had Michael with them. Normally she might not even ask. "Where did they go?"

"Dr. Brennan and Agent Booth's house. They wanted to surprise them with food and whatnot."

"Whatnot?"

"Whatnot. You know. It's kind of like thingamabobs, doohickey and gizmos. I'm not sure what whatnot is but that's what Hodgins said."

Cam simply shook her head. "Whatnot," she repeated. But she discovered the meaning of whatnot in seconds when her phone chirped and a police officer on the other line defined the whatnot that Hodgins and Angela had gotten into at Booth's house.

oOo

Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.

He leaned against the wall of the shower and willed the anger to flow down the drain.

Bones would tell him that anger didn't do that, that it wasn't manifest destiny or whipped cream or some such thing, and couldn't just pour out of someone and down a drain, but he willed it anyway.

The hot water of the shower in the motel they'd stopped at was supposed to untie the knots in his back; it was supposed to give him a time out so he didn't say something else to further divide them.

But there was a new line between them.

Right now it was the 3 feet or so between the twin queen-sized beds in that damned motel room, Bones on the left bed by the wall and he on the bed closest to the door, the baby's crib jammed into the space between them.

He'd drawn this line. Hell, he could blame Bones for the damned line, but it was him, all him. She'd apologized, explained herself, been through her own kind of hell. Hadn't he seen the bruises? The small one on her cheek was nothing to the one he'd seen on her hip that spilled down onto her upper thigh.

Despite that—_maybe because of that_—he drew the line, sending her to her side of the room and him to his and the baby divided in half like that baby in King Solomon's day.

And he wasn't sure if he could ever forgive her for what she had done to him. To their family. To _them_.

And as irrational as it was, that led to him listening for the breathing of his daughter, listening for the sounds of his partner, listening for the world outside their door, the rhythms of his life three months ago warring with the current rhythms which weren't quite rhythms anymore, just disconnected actions.

But all was silent. Yet he could not sleep for the roaring in his ears and the ache in his back. Perhaps it is in silence that the breaking heart sounds loudest and creates the heaviest burden.

He gave up on sleep and tried to see Christine then Brennan by the light of the clock to reassure himself that they were there, but he gave up opting for turning on the light.

Half the room was bathed in the light from the table lamp and if Bones had been sleeping, she wasn't now.

"Is something wrong?"

He wished for his government-issued truck then and for the flashlight in the back because at that moment he did not want conversation with her. "No," he said. "I was just checking on the baby."

"What time is it?"

The clock was marking time in microseconds or something like it because it was only a few minutes before midnight. She was blinking against the light despite shielding her eyes, a look that he had come to know since Christine had entered their lives.

"Is it your back? Is it bothering you?"

He couldn't fool her—the tension and the driving over the past few days had taken its toll and she had seen something earlier in his posture, something in his gait.

"It's fine," he grumbled. "I didn't mean to wake you."

"I wasn't sleeping."

Her voice was soft and whispery and he wished he hadn't turned on that damned light.

"Do you want me to massage your back?"

Technically, legally he should have chained her to the desk or something, _she was his prisoner, he did have to rescue her from being arrested by arresting her_, and part of him had wanted to leave her handcuffed just to punish her for taking Christine and disappearing as she had, but the stabbing pain in his back won out.

"Yeah."

He'd already positioned himself out of habit on his side of the bed, so it was just a matter of flipping over—_painfully_—so she could access his aching muscles, and her magic fingers began their journey up and down his spine, expelling the demon invaders and leaving only happy villagers in their wake and somehow he fell asleep.

oOo

It was magic hour, the moments before dawn, when the day breaks new and offers up a myriad of possibilities.

The baby had stirred and Brennan, being closest, had reached into the crib to smooth away her restlessness, cooing softly to her daughter to reassure her that her parents were close.

Booth had woken, too, to the sound of his daughter, the primal call speaking to something deep within him. He listened as Brennan comforted her, felt the still warm path along his body where his partner had curled into him, felt the cool where she had separated as she moved to touch their daughter.

It was a small interruption in their sleep, something he had been used to three months ago, a small wrinkle in the rhythm of his life.

It was magic hour or the magic minute, 4:47 a.m. to be precise, when one or both of them—now awake and very aware that mere inches separated them—reached for the other. Later, neither would claim to be the first, yet somehow someone was the first.

And so it began.

No words were spoken because words had betrayed them and had already drawn the boundary line that both were now trying to cross. No words were spoken as they shed the last their clothes, but not the last of their defenses. No words were needed, only sighs and gasps.

And tears.

At first the kisses were tentative touches of lips against skin as if trying to remember paths that had been blazed before. Then the rhythm of the kisses became bolder until lips touched lips.

And there were more tears.

Fingers traveled along familiar trails erasing some evidence of the boundaries between them, but only some.

It would take more time and tears to erase them, leaving only that faint memory of a line and why it had been drawn.

They did not make love that morning because they already had the love. It bound them together as certainly as it had for years when fear had been the line between them. They had love even though it was as fragile as a spider's web. And as nearly as strong.

They did not make love that morning as they rolled one kind of tension into another.

They did not make love; they made hope.

oOo

**A/N: I feel like I should do a Charles Kuralt commentary since I'm 900 miles from home. (Charles Kuralt traveled the USA in an RV for CBS News and crafted folksy stories of ordinary people that were quite lovely. YouTube him. Video quality will be horrible, but the stories are wonderful.)**

**At a certain point I start to think of this as some never-ending story (I told myself I was done with long stories after Songs in the Key of Life) and it will rule my thoughts and time well into season 8. But no! Just like my trip, this, too, shall end. **


	18. Phase 18

**Phase 18: Paper Locks**

oOo

"Really?"

Booth handed Max Keenan the baby's diaper bag and tried to steer him from their room and the sight of both queen-sized beds looking slept in.

"You two couldn't work something out?"

He didn't want relationship advice from Max, didn't want to talk about it, didn't want much of anything from the man right now except his cooperation in getting them moving and on the road, but Max had other ideas.

"She wouldn't compromise your job, Seeley. And if you went with her. . . ."

He interrupted, hoping to quash this conversation as quickly as possible. "We've talked about this Max. I get it. I do. But it still hurts like hell when someone runs off like that. You don't have any idea how it is to watch your family drive off and have no idea if you'll ever see them again."

But the one person who knew that feeling, who had lived with the unknown for over 15 years, had come back from the car and he caught her eye.

For a long, long time, he hadn't realized the soft side beneath the hard, but the years of their partnership had taught him differently as had living with her for almost a year.

And when he caught her eye, he caught the pain as well.

It lasted for the briefest of moments, passing quickly like a blink, and had he not known her so well, he might have dismissed it as merely a trick of the light.

"Dad, did you take all of Christine's things out of the car?"

She was sidestepping the emotion, but Max wasn't willing to accept the new state of things.

"Honey, I really think the two of you might just want to stay someplace as a family and reconnect." Max was playing Dr. Phil. "Don't go back home right away. Maybe give your team some time to put that SOB behind bars."

"We'll be safe, Dad." Her voice changed taking on a no-nonsense tone. "Booth will keep us safe."

This time when he looked at her and caught her eye he saw the certainty that he needed to see.

"There's only so much you can do." Max just wasn't letting this go. "As painful as it is, honey, your mother got killed. Sometimes things happen beyond your control."

There was a moment of that silent communication between father and daughter and Booth could sense that this may have been a topic between the two during their weeks on the run.

But nothing had been resolved; the pain was back in her eyes.

"We're fine, Max," Booth said, trying to close the door on the conversation and on their motel room. Christine had been sitting in stroller limbo, just to the right of the door, and while she'd been quiet and drowsy, she began to move.

"Really?" Max nodded his head toward the beds. "From where I stand the two of you are doing anything but trying to work this out. And Pelant is still out there."

"Let it go, Max," Booth said, his defenses still tattered. He grabbed the handles of Christine's stroller and began to push her toward the car.

Another look at Brennan—one of those quick glances—and he could tell she wanted an end to the conversation as well. They'd taken the edge off of his anger and her guilt, but only just and he wanted to get in the car and drive down to the restaurant where they were supposed to meet up with Russ and get back onto the road toward their house.

House, not home, he thought. Hell, now he was talking like Bones.

"Maybe you should talk to that psychiatrist friend of yours," Max continued. "That young kid who testified at my trial."

"Dad." Bones was now pulling Christine from the stroller and wrestling with the baby and her father's stubbornness. "Russ is waiting for us."

But Booth had had enough. The anger he'd been trying to hold on to was beginning to come loose in his grip and had two things not happened, he might have carried out his long-standing desire to put Max Keenan flat on his back for stealing away his family and his summer.

One, Bones interceded using Christine as the catalyst. "Dad, would you please put  
Christine in our car?" She put herself between himself and her father and held out the baby.

Two, his phone rang. He'd turned it off last night refusing to let the outside world interfere with his life anymore. But as Max was accepting the hand-off from Bones and Christine sketched what looked like a small wave his way which almost melted his heart, he turned on his phone and willed it to ring if only to stop Max from being his focal point.

And it did.

"Booth. What?"

It took a shocked second or two longer for an answer, but he got one.

"Hello to you, too, Seeley," Cam was saying on the other line. "You need to get back here. There was some trouble at your house."

oOo

They waited downstairs.

And waited.

The smoke had not followed them downstairs and had there been a hint of it, she was certain she'd be out of the house and down the street faster than. . . well, she wasn't quite sure what the standard of speed she'd used, but she'd certainly do what she could to outrun death.

The smell of burned plastic hung in the air around them.

"Are you sure we're okay, Babe?"

Her voice was as shaky as she felt. But Jack pulled her hand into his lap and pulled her closer. "We're fine. Cam will be here soon and she'll do a preliminary examination. . . ."

"I don't understand why we can't just call the authorities and let the FBI deal with this." Her voice sounded higher than usual and she swallowed and tried again. "They're supposed to deal with things like this."

But Jack was certain, and something about that certainty was calming. "If there's a big FBI presence here, someone might notice it. So we have to do this differently. We need to recover as much of the evidence as possible, Ange, but do it without letting anyone know we're doing it."

Jack had managed to dump the flowers and the water and to overturn the vase onto the smoke coming from the broken clock radio. Anything more and she hadn't seen; she'd run from the smoke just steps ahead of her husband who had steered her into Brennan's office when they finally landed on the first floor.

"It probably wasn't cyanide or any of the fast-acting poisons," he mused. "Or else we wouldn't have made it this far."

Then he was quiet, a little too quiet.

"You okay, babe?"

They were perched on the padded window seat in the office with a good view of Brennan's desk where a small pile of photos were scattered—most of them of Christine—as if the occupant of the room had just been looking through them and had been interrupted.

"Yeah, yeah," he said almost absentmindedly. "You?"

"I think I stubbed my toe."

No reaction.

"My hair is starting to melt."

Still no reaction.

"Large, purple pustules are growing all over my body. All over."

Still nothing.

"Jack? Hey." She slid over to her husband and shook him by the shoulder. "Earth to Jack. Come in Major Tom."

"I'm just trying to figure out what it was."

"Of course you are."

She abhorred violence, especially the kind of violence they dealt with regularly that saw people die by blade and bullet and bomb and any number of other horrific means, but as Pelant inched closer and closer to her own life, she was beginning to understand the urge to kill.

Thankfully, they'd both be in Michael's life long after something like this.

"It was probably set up to be activated when Brennan hit the snooze button so it had to be something that required a small electrical current to work." Jack was now talking through the problem. "Or it was set on some timer. But if that were true, then it would have affected Booth. So it had to be something that Brennan controlled or maybe he set up some kind of remote control, but that. . . ."

"Jack?" She really didn't need to know one more way people could die; she'd seen too many as it was. "It probably wasn't supposed to smoke like that."

"You know, honey," she said, trying to break through his own fog, "you can let the FBI do the work on this one. We almost got killed."

She didn't mean to sound so pathetically weak, but unless she concentrated on something else—the photos on the desk, the books on the shelves, the eclectic bits of Brennan's professional travels displayed on the limited wall space—she would think of what almost happened to them, what could have happened to Brennan or to Booth or to the baby, and it left her shaky and feeling very, very vulnerable.

While his scientist brain was working full tilt, his husband brain kicked in and he wrapped an arm around her, drawing her closer. "It's all good, Ange. We're fine. Probably a lot of that smoke would have condensed on the inside of the glass and we can analyze that, and then there would be trace. . . ."

"Jack?" Her head hurt from this whole thing. "Could you just talk about something else? I don't really want to think about how we almost died or how Pelant would have killed Brennan."

She'd been the first to say it out loud—Pelant.

And now, the rush of feeling safe gone, fear took over again and she was shaking.

"Hey, hey, babe, it's okay," Jack soothed. "We're fine. Who would have thought that being clumsy was a good thing?"

He was rubbing her back as he held her close, his voice soothing and calming to her very, decided unsteadiness and it was easy, oh so easy, to just fold herself into his softness and try not to think too much about what could have happened.

oOo

He redrew the line and she now belonged to Booth's _other_ family: the people he loved, but didn't much like.

These were the new terms of their relationship: Christine would have a father and she would have. . . a partner.

And not a partner.

They'd spent weeks apart and now he needed more time. They'd been miles apart all summer and now he needed more distance.

Sex had been a reconnection and a disconnection, a hello and a goodbye.

She had dissolved in the shower that morning, tallying all the paradoxes as her tears had flowed down the drain uncounted. When she emerged from the bathroom, she had steeled herself for this new relationship, one she had had much practice in before they had ever become a couple and one she had no idea how to play.

He'd said little in the car except to ask about Christine's progress over the months of separation and as irrational as it was, she had felt his pain as she outlined the milestones that he had missed with the second of his children. At each rest stop he became Christine's primary caregiver, pushing her to the periphery as he tried to re-establish himself in his child's life, leaving her feeling as she had for so much of her life—on the outside looking in on a family that she wanted but had little idea how to hold onto.

oOo

Lance Sweets felt the handle of the ice chest slip as his foot hit the unfamiliar terrain and he let out a yelp that stopped Wendell Bray in his tracks.

"You okay there, Dr. Sweets?" Wendell asked.

Sweets put down his end of the ice chest and wiped his hand on his pants, then wound his hand back through the handle of the chest. "Why couldn't we have brought in the ice and just dumped it into the chest?"

He'd raised his voice as if to announce their intention, then wondered if it was just a bit too much given what they were dealing with.

But Wendell only grimaced as they made the last few steps to the back door and set down the chest. "Party gear is here," he announced. "I'd huff and I'd puff, but I'm too pooped to pop."

Sweets screwed up his face, not sure what Wendell was talking about. "This is the last of it," he said as he slid the patio door open and stepped into the kitchen.

The other equipment Hodgins needed to retrieve what was left of the alarm clock upstairs was already spread out through the kitchen as Wendell closed the sliding glass door. Brought in piecemeal through the guise of a party to welcome home the prodigal Brennan and her daughter, they'd followed the etymologist's paranoid prescription to the letter.

Hodgins was dressed in the bottom half of his chemical-proof suit, just waiting on the helmet and oxygen tanks they'd hauled up from the car.

In some ways it looked like a band of traveling musicians had taken up residence in the kitchen, what with the guitar cases and keyboard cases strewn about. Boxes bearing the marks of various local groceries and a couple of ice chests rounded out the look of a party without actually containing anything remotely needed for one.

"Hey man," Wendell said, "we couldn't bring the large oxygen tank in the ice chest."

"Don't need it," Hodgins countered. "I'm just going to assess the situation, put the alarm clock into the containment box, and bring it downstairs. Two, three minutes tops."

"You're sure, babe?" Angela had a laptop open on the kitchen table and was peering over the monitor. "You are a father, you know."

But Hodgins only grinned and leaned in to plant a kiss on her cheek. "I intend to watch Michael attend his senior prom and drive him to his dorm at college. I plan to be in his life and yours for a very long time."

And from what Sweets could tell, those weren't idle words. Two other suits sat draped over the backs of the kitchen chairs and a large Plexiglass case sat in the middle of the floor.

"You've got the hazmat team on speed dial, right?" Sweets asked Angela.

Wendell had tried to reassure him on the drive over, and even Hodgins, made it sound simple. Suit up and as one person holds the Plexiglass shell above the clock, another uses tongs to life the clock while the third person slides the bottom of the shell in place.

"Easy peasy, Dr. Sweets," Wendell offered. "Shouldn't take more than 5 minutes if there isn't an explosion."

He'd suited up in the past at the lab and at that hoarder's apartment, in part, so he offer insights on sight. But this? This was something else entirely.

"If you want to change, you can use Brennan's office," Angela said as she studied her monitor.

Wendell looked rather pleased with himself. "I spent a lot of time putting this place together for Dr. Brennan and Agent Booth and I'd hate to see something happen to it."

"Are you sure we'll be safe?"

He'd volunteered, helped transport enough equipment for a small army and suddenly he felt the weight of what they were about to do.

But Hodgins saw only one direction and that was forward. He slapped Sweets on the back. "This is how we're going to get that bastard," he said, "And he's going to wish he never challenged the Jeffersonian."

oOo

"He would have been in the house at least twice, Booth. The first to find out what kind of clock I had, and the second time to replace it with the altered clock."

They were barreling down the interstate while Hodgins was taking apart a clock meant to do something to one or both of them and he couldn't help but want to hold Bones to reassure himself that he hadn't lost her. But he had to settle for her voice, sure and steady, wrapping itself within the logic of the situation and dispelling all emotion in favor of cold, hard facts.

Had he wanted to hold her he wasn't sure she would accept given his pronouncement that morning and the cool distance growing between them as a result.

"That makes sense," Cam agreed. "Putting a different clock on the nightstand would stand out."

Bones had the phone perched on the back of the front seat and the speaker volume set high. They'd all heard the whole story of how Hodgins and Angela had found the problem with the clock and had retrieved it from their bedroom and taken it to the lab for analysis.

"I don't understand," Russ said. "He already framed you for the murder of your friend. Why does he have to put some kind of time bomb in your house?"

"There's no evidence that it is a time bomb," Bones corrected.

"He's not saying it's a time bomb literally," Booth said. "Let us know what Hodgins finds out."

"Will do," Cam said before ending the call.

"That son of a bitch was in your house twice." Bones might have let go of the argument that flight was far better than fighting for her life in the system, but Max wasn't. "There's no telling what else he tampered with."

"Twice." That was Russ sitting in the backseat with Bones and the baby marveling at the audacity of Pelant. "If he was in there twice, couldn't he have been in there more than that?"

Once was bad enough, but twice was sheer agony. And more? Booth gripped the steering wheel tighter and urged the truck to go faster.

A glance toward the backseat to where Bones was told him she was moving well past having Pelant in their home to another plane entirely. "Whatever he set up would have to be powered by three 1.5 volt batteries. Any trace evidence would have to be destroyed in an explosion or a chemical burn or a meltdown of the. . . ."

"You're thinking like him now?"

Russ had driven through much of the night to meet up with them and his normally even temper was slowly becoming more and more frayed. He'd relinquished driving to Booth for a seat in the back with the baby and Bones. He'd done it to get some sleep, but the news from their home was anything but restful.

The look he was giving his sister was pure worry. He'd been giving Bones lots of different looks—joy at seeing her again, concern when he pulled her off to the side at the restaurant to talk to her, amusement at just how easily she slipped into mother mode.

And Bones? He could tell her mind was running through the possibilities. She had that look of concentration, the look that was pure Bones, that he had missed all these months.

"Could I use your phone, Booth?"

He fished it out of his pocket again and handed it back to her before he even thought about it. He could see the hesitation just after she turned it on. The background picture was one of her and Christine, both of their faces bubbling with laughter as Bones was taking the baby from her bath. It had become one of several photos he had carried with him to remind him of what Pelant had taken and what he might never have again.

The hesitation lasted only a moment and then she was speaking to Cam again.

He could hardly keep track of the conversation as it went from poly this and methyl that before she shut down the phone and handed it back to him.

"Hodgins have anything yet?"

Miles from home, they were officially _unofficially_ working the case.

"According to Hodgins, there was some trace of the smoke left in the overturned vase. He's running it through the mass spec now." Christine, hearing her mother's voice, was responding with her own unintelligible comments. "Beyond that, they don't have enough data."

"So Pelant was going to kill you somehow," Max said. "If he didn't get to you in the system, he was going to kill you in your home."

"How many chemicals do that?" Russ asked.

"You'd be surprised," Max interjected. "Just combining bleach and ammonia would be very effective."

"It would have to be something small enough to fit into the clock case," Bones said. "Hodgins said he thought the smoke was inadvertent when the chemicals interacted with the plastic, melting it."

"Eliminating fingerprints as well." Booth saw Pelant laughing at them. "Nothing to tie it back to him."

"We don't have enough evidence yet," she murmured, almost to herself.

"We let Hodgins figure out what was in the clock and then we try to trace the whatever it was back to Pelant," Booth said, his confidence a bit shaky.

"Maybe not." Booth listened as Bones took his phone again and placed another call and the noose around Pelant's neck was possibly in place.

oOo

Caroline Julian knew exactly why Seeley Booth disliked the Jeffersonian lab so much. The scientists buzzed around the place like pesky bees only stopping in their flight when someone got a little too close and then they would sting with a string of scientific mumbo jumbo that only left one feeling woozy trying to make sense of any of it.

But she needed them as certainly as a farmer needed bees to pollinate their fields and as long as she could get one or more of them to talk in English or teeny tiny syllables that a jury could understand, she could work with them.

Because she liked to win.

Juries might be spoiled on TV shows that wrapped up a murder mystery into a neat little bundle in 44 minutes or so, but she knew that lab tests and lady justice both took their own sweet time and almost nothing got wrapped up neatly in sanitary little bundles when someone was finally pronounced guilty. A murder was just a stone tossed into a still pond producing multiple ripples that seemed to touch far too many people.

And so was running from a murder charge.

So she wove her way past the busy bee scientists and their shiny machines looking for Dr. Saroyan hoping theyi could stop the rippling waters or, at least, conjure up some good ripples from a decidedly heavy stone against the water.

Finding Dr. Saroyan wasn't the problem, it was where she found her—elbow deep in muck that at one time was someone's child but now was just over 150 pounds of globs and goo.

"Miss Julian," Dr. Saroyan greeted her, "are you here about Pelant's shoes?"

One thing that Caroline Julian could never figure out was just how someone as put-together-sophisticated-in-a-New-York-City-way like Camille Saroyan could go from that to human-remains-splayed-over-a-table-like-Thanksgiving-with-a-pack-of-dogs.

"Over 15,000 shoes with that pattern sold in the D.C. area alone last year," she offered, her nose wrinkling at the smell of the human leftovers on Saroyan's autopsy table.

"And how many of those were size 11?"

"Over two thousand," she countered. "Apparently size 11 is a popular size for creepazoid serial killers."

Saroyan sighed and shook her head. "So did you bring any good news?"

This time Caroline snorted. "Good news as in your bug guy and his artist wife are not dead trying to do a good deed for someone?"

It had been a long, stressful day. Camille Saroyan, no matter how well put together she might appear, was looking a bit frayed, although a far sight better than the body on her slab. "They're fine. Dr. Hodgins and Angela will take a fresh look at everything tomorrow."

Caroline had heard the entire story and had arranged for a few FBI techs to quietly scour the house for any additional booby traps. "I'd feel a whole lot better if they were still in the lab working away on this."

"They have a son," Cam Cam paused in her work separating one icky thing from the next. "So have you brought any good news?"

"How would you like to work with the finest forensic anthropologist in the country?"

The look of hopefulness on Cam's face made the trip almost worthwhile.

"The powers that be in the FBI are willing to work with Dr. Brennan if she is supervised by an FBI agent in good standing and yourself subject to further review which is just FBI-speak for she's on probation."

"And the Jeffersonian board is willing to retain her services if she is supervised as well," Cam added with a sigh. "Thank God."

"And the Justice Department is willing to accept her placement as a consultant contingent upon how successful she is testifying in court."

Camille Saroyan was not only sophisticated but savvy as well. She understood completely.

"It doesn't matter how good she is at her job," Cam said slowly. "If she can't get past this with a jury, she's toast."

And it was damned hard to predict how well someone like Dr. Brennan would do in court, thought Caroline. While she had seen her soften a bit, even translate some of the technospeak gobbledygook into 8th grade English for the jury, she wasn't sure she'd be able to satisfactorily explain to a jury why she had decided to see the back roads of the United States for three months with a murder charge hanging over her head.

"She. . . she should do fine," Cam said deliberately. "She knows what's at stake if she's out of the picture."

But Caroline wasn't so sure. She'd seen the woman crack on the stand against Heather Taffett, knew just how passionate she was under that cool exterior, how vulnerable, but would she just want a quiet life after all of this? Raise her baby, love her Booth, leave the life? Caroline had learned entirely too much about the woman's finances over the last few days and knew that with that kind of bank account, the woman could well afford to sit back and put her feet up and turn a blind eye to madness and mayhem.

"So Pelant could still win this one," Cam added.

"Let's just say that the jury's out on all of this," Caroline said. "And hell if I know what any of them are going to do."

oOo

There really wasn't any rush to get back: Caroline had promised to get the warrant for Pelant's arrest in the morning if they found anything tonight. Hacker had agents to watch that bastard and somehow it felt as if that dull throb in his head could just vanish and give him some relief.

But it was still there, an achy reminder of the fact that it wasn't over yet.

One look toward Bones told him it wasn't over. She'd been studying him ever since he'd met up with her at that chapel and her gaze now seemed overlaid with something more than curiosity, something he wasn't quite sure of.

He should be used to her rushing ahead of him—that's what she did. Her brain worked so much faster than his did; her eyes saw so much better than his at times. He could consider her running as another version of the same thing: her supersonic brain rushing toward a conclusion while he was just beginning to see what she was looking at.

But this was more. It was about trust and faith and honesty and the core of what they were to each other, what they were as a couple. It was about more than love.

He closed his eyes and felt a stab of envy for Christine and even Max. The baby could snuggle down into her car seat and sleep past the tension and strain within the vehicle just like her grandfather who had been peppering the silence in the car with short snores.

"You want me to drive?"

Russ had crossed over from the octagonal building that housed the restrooms and was holding out two cans of soda.

Booth took one can and nodded his thanks.

Christine had woken with a wail and had been inconsolable so he had pulled into the nearest rest area and watched as Bones disappeared with his daughter into the building.

"It feels good," Booth said, "the cool air tonight."

Russ directed them toward a picnic table between the car and the building and stood while Booth secured a seat with a good view of the doors of the building.

For several moments they sat and Booth felt the vibrations of the road ease from his body and he settled into trying to ease the kinks from his back.

"When I went out West, left Tempe to be dealt with by DCFS, I felt nothing for a long time. I was numb."

Booth said nothing.

"Our parents had disappeared and Tempe was so angry. Feeling nothing was easier."

Russ sipped at his soda and Booth wondered if he wanted to hear this, but like a car wreck, it was like he needed to see the extent of the damage so he said nothing.

"I was always looking out for her at school, letting her know I was around and then, I was gone, too."

It wasn't hard to know the point of the story and had it been Max here he might have shut him down like he'd been doing all day. But Russ had been in his shoes and understood how deep the wound went.

"Give it time, Booth," Russ said. "Give her time."

Time. They'd been too much between them and now he just wanted more.

"How long did it take you before you forgave Max? How long before Bones forgave him?"

Russ looked at him in the growing gloom of the evening. "Two different situations. Two different systems of measurement."

"What? The science talk rubbed off on you?"

Russ grinned and nodded. "A little. I just didn't end up in foster care. I did the easy thing and left strangers to deal with my sister. She blamed me for them taking off. Something I did." He studied his hands. "Love was pretty thin when I left."

Booth sipped at his soda. Pops had once explained that sometimes love was like taffy—it could be stretched thin it would break or be so thick you could hardly get your hands around it.

But love wasn't the issue. He loved her. He did. He'd reassured her that morning. Told her what had hurt him. Had watched the pain on her face as he poured out his own.

"Work it out, Booth," Russ said. "You know it will be worth it with her. Just work it out."

He had no reply because his phone began to vibrate and he pulled it from his pocket and listened as an excited Hodgins gave him the news.

"We got him!" Hodgins said. "We got Pelant."


	19. Last Phase

**Paper Locks: The final phase**

_A/N: Didn't mean to disappear on you, dear readers. _

oOo

She'd always been ahead of him in some things—_so_ _many things really_—and she was ahead of him today, too. Almost all morning he'd been a step behind and only now when they were inside the Hoover did she hang back as if to recognize that this was his domain. It seemed uncharacteristic of the woman he knew, the woman who had never stopped working the case, the woman who had thrown away the rules of their partnership for a whole new playbook.

He was in awe of her on that score even though he was equally as angry; taking off as she had had been absolutely brilliant. She'd outwitted Pelant, outsmarted him, her partner, outmaneuvered them all. She'd unlocked the key to Sawyer's code and helped save herself, saved Caroline, saved them as a team.

And he should be happy. Bones and his daughter were both safely home now. Despite the early hour, the house had been alive again with more voices than his own—Bones' soft singing to a giggly Christine and Russ and Max arguing good-naturedly over breakfast preparations before seeing them off.

But as he watched Angela wrap his partner in a fierce embrace just outside the elevators, he struggled with his own emotions that teetered between joy and anger.

"Hey Booth, you really need to tell your FBI guys to swab a bit deeper."

It was not the first greeting he could think of with a prodigal Bones accompanying him, but the second made up for the first. Angela finally let go of Brennan who was immediately wrapped up by Hodgins in a hug.

Angela immediately grabbed Brennan's arm and held on tightly. "Sweetie, are you going to keep this?" Angela asked as she touched the dark tresses.

Bones shook her head. "No, it should wash out eventually."

He'd already been able to see hints of golden brown amid the darker tones that morning as they both tried to squeeze into the bathroom downstairs. They'd gotten in late last night and surrendered the upstairs bedrooms to Russ and Max, putting Christine between them in a crib on the floor while each took up one of the living room couches as a bed. It wasn't lost on him that each had gravitated to their own couch brought over from his apartment or her loft as if they were retreating to old familiar ground.

"Really, Booth. The techs missed it. There were some broken treads on Pelant's shoes and they should have swabbed deeper."

Hodgins wasn't letting it go—_whatever it was_—and he finally had had enough as they made their way toward the conference room. "Just spell it out for me, Hodgins."

Hodgins had a Jeffersonian folder in hand and was reading from it. "A parasitic mito. . . ."

"Small words. Easily digestible this early in the morning."

The folder closed and Hodgins was grinning. "The fungus, the citrus fungus, is evident in Pelant's shoes. His shoes also match the design we found in the Wieboldt building down to the wear patterns."

"_One tiny step for mankind_," Booth thought to himself. "Is there more?"

They'd reached the conference room and he watched as Brennan was greeted in turn by Cam and Sweets and even by Caroline who steered his partner to a chair near the head of the table.

"We've got fingerprints," Cam announced. "The part of the plastic casing of the clock that wasn't melted held a full thumb print and three digits as well as a number of partials."

"You didn't invite Christopher Pelant over for some kind of genius get together, did you, cher?"

Caroline was giving him the look—raised eyebrows and a hint of a grin.

"Can we tell when he was in the house?"

Bones' eyes told him the answer, but he had to ask it anyway.

"No," Angela offered. "But the FBI techs took a number of items from your home for further testing."

He'd watched as the FBI techs had removed Brennan's laptop and samples of her clothing and hairbrush from the house and could only imagine what other items were now missing. Part of him would give up the house itself if it meant that Pelant was put away and his family was safe. He'd barely shut his eyes that night when he had woken to a new world in which Pelant's belongings were to go through the same process as Bones' had just months earlier.

His brain, still scrambled from too much driving and too little rest was slowly catching up. "Do we have a warrant?" he asked.

"All it needs is a nice bow and some shiny ribbon," Caroline said as she pressed the paper into his hands. "And all we need is a damned serial killer in a nice big box."

He scanned the warrant then turned toward Brennan. Her eyes were edged with worry and he held her gaze as if to reassure her.

"Agent Gilroy is waiting downstairs with his band of merry men," Caroline continued. "Go wrap this up."

He turned but stopped at the next question, the question he should have asked, but Brennan did.

"What was in the clock?"

If he hadn't been so focused on capturing Pelant, he might have noticed how Brennan was the only one seated and that Cam and Caroline were hovering nearby. He might have noticed that both Angela and Sweets were casting glances toward the trio at the corner of the table. But like so much lately, his focus was narrow and his vision was clouded by emotion that seemed to run counter to how a man in his situation should feel.

"I'm still analyzing the results from the mass spec," Hodgins offered, "and there seemed to be a polymerdiscombobulation built into the clock to destroy the polymer resins but the diaskeletonboopsy candlewaxsong deliciousgorillagoo. . . ."

The words were merging together into gibberish and his impatience was greater with one foot out the door so he was grateful when Cam interceded.

"It's a powerful psychotropic drug which might have caused brain damage," she explained, "or psychosis. Aerosolized, it would have been extremely potent."

"You wouldn't have been able to help yourself if you were in the system."

Sweets' words gave him pause and he looked toward Brennan who seemed to have already come to that conclusion. She looked tired which only seemed to accentuate the tension and had he not girded his heart to protect it these past few months, he might have done something more than simply give her a nod and go.

oOo

Sweets would tell her later that it was a defensive measure, pure and simple, but she was coming to understand that nothing was pure or simple in the wake of framing her for Ethan Sawyer's murder. While she wasn't particularly strong at nonverbal cues and she sometimes had great difficulty in understanding Dr. Cam Saroyan and Caroline Julian, she had little trouble in deciphering their message.

Christopher Pelant had altered her life.

"The Justice Department wants reassurances that you are fully committed to performing your duties as a forensic anthropologist within the confines of the law and. . . ."

It was rational. A scientist in the employ of the federal government, even as an independent contractor, needed to act within the law. Her flight had been an attempt to avoid the mounting evidence, to avoid jail, to avoid whatever traps Christopher Pelant could engineer within the system. It was only rational to lay out some ground rules for her continued employment.

"The Jeffersonian board needs assurances that. . . ."

It was a rational response to her actions. Make sure that she fully understood how circumventing the arrest warrant ran counter to her work with the Jeffersonian on behalf of the Justice Department. Make sure she was punished for doing nothing more than protecting herself, protecting Booth, protecting her daughter.

A thread of resentment pulled at her patience and she bit back a response, her father's advice helping her find the equilibrium when all she wanted to do was to push back at the stupidity of the new working parameters. Max had pulled her into a hug that morning and whispered to her to "give it time." She hadn't been sure to what he had been referring, but Russ had been less circumspect when he had told her, "Booth will come around." A glance the smattering of FBI agents beyond the glass walls only acted as a reminder of a world outside this room. Booth was going up against Pelant and while he might be surrounded by other agents, the computer hacker was far more resourceful than any other serial killer they had seen before. Her concern right now was for his safety; she could do little to reassure the FBI or the Jeffersonian board until she was allowed back to work.

She stood abruptly and tried to brush off the looks of concern from Cam and Caroline.

"My employment with the Jeffersonian is contingent upon ongoing fitness reviews from the FBI," she summarized. It wasn't entirely accurate, nor fair given her exemplary work record, but she didn't particularly care. Something far more important was pulling her attention away from the two women and she already understood that her old life, the one she had fought to regain, was no longer the life she had expected.

Cam's expression was easy enough to read—surprise mixed with concern—but Caroline simply squinted at her and she had little idea what it meant.

She was only now emerging from some deep, dark recesses—locked away for being a bit too clumsy in approaching Pelant and Ethan and now all she wanted to do was to wait for Booth to return. "I'd like to go to the lab," she stated.

Caroline's scowl deepened and she schooled her features to betray little more than her desire to return to familiar territory to wait out Pelant's arrest. She could find her balance there, find answers to other puzzles while she tried to decipher Booth's long silences.

Cam's expression softened. "Welcome back, Dr. Brennan."

She nodded, softly thanked them both, then left the conference room.

But it was not the lab that drew her. There she would have to contend with the others and right now she felt off balance. She headed down the hallway to Booth's office, to a familiar place where she could wait out the outcome of Pelant's arrest.

The visitor's badge gave her free access, so she made the short walk toward Booth's office then paused as she seemed to have taken a wrong turn. The route, walked hundreds of times over the past seven years or so, had not varied and she glanced around her to make certain that she had the right floor, the right hall.

But it wasn't the right room; or rather, it was, but it was no longer Booth's office. The bobble-head Bobby, the old cameras, the sports photos on the wall, John Dillinger's wanted poster—all of those were missing as was the nameplate and in its place was the name of someone else.

oOo

He studied the imager on the iPad. The thermal imagery showed one occupant in Pelant's home. One. Just one. By the floor plan of the place superimposed over the thermal scan, in his bedroom; by the positioning in the room, in bed.

That's what an early wake-up call got them: surprise.

The flak jacket was for Christine. Taking point was for Bones.

The assault rifle was for himself.

A precaution—always a precaution—but this time to prevent Pelant from stealing away any more of his happiness in the event he had one of his homemade weapons at hand.

"Operation Zuse, a go. Repeat, you have a go."

The whispered voice in his head was all he needed and Agent Gilroy gestured to the man wielding lock picks.

Some higher up had probably Googled some kind of computer guru to come up with the name of the operation, but Booth hardly gave it a thought.

With barely a sound, they were in.

There was a team in the back and a bomb squad on call and strict orders not to touch anything.

Just arrest Pelant.

The home was small, the operation over almost as quickly as it began.

Later he would consider just how important it was to close the door on Pelant to reclaim the life he had had before the smarmy worm had crawled into it.

Later he would find that time alone couldn't heal the hurt of a summer apart.

Later he would explain these things to Bones, let her know just how jumbled the emotions had been as he tried to separate worry from betrayal, anger from concern.

Later. Much later.

But now, standing over Pelant's bed, all he felt was a murderous rage.

And fear.

Nothing was ever what it should be with Pelant. Nothing. He had learned each lesson from Pelant the hard way. And this was another lesson learned a little too late.

The bed where Pelant was supposed to be was empty.

oOo

There was only silence.

Really, what was there to say?

Her computer, made up of dozens of processors and protected behind a wall, was silent as well as it tried to figure out what they had not been able to.

"The thermal imagery is recorded and stored in the surveillance van's computers," Angela pronounced. Ethan Sawyer's program had washed the surveillance footage and now the time stamp and the location markers were wiped from it and they could all see the date was off as was the time the FBI would imprint on the recording.

And there was silence.

Cam stood with arms crossed against her chest, a stance Angela had seen hundreds of times over the years, but now a gesture of defense. Next to her, Sweets, his hands at his sides, his head bowed a bit, his whole body leaning toward the screen. Jack, she knew, was just an arm's length away, to her left, his presence the only comfort she had.

Pelant had pulled out another of his sleight of hand tricks, now you see it, now you don't, and he had staged a disappearing act for himself.

Caroline was shaking her head as in slow motion, her mouth set in a crooked grimace as she, too, had grown silent and pensive in the wake of this latest setback.

And Booth and Brennan?

They stood slightly apart from the group and slightly apart from each other. Neither had to say anything because the ache was etched in their postures—Booth, the agitation clear in his stance and in his face; Brennan still like glass, her head slightly tilted away from her partner a look of pain all too clear in her face.

"He's arrogant," Sweets began, his voice strange against the silence. "He's made mistakes before."

But the mistakes seemed small compared to what he had been able to do. Somehow through his own manipulations of the electronic arts, he had created his own little rabbit hole into which he had disappeared.

"He's one step ahead of us," Cam said. "Again."

They watched the thermal imagery change on its loop from the splotches of reds and oranges and yellows that indicated Pelant's presence in his bed to the real image of cool blues that showed no human presence there at all.

They watched as the shock gave way to resignation and first Caroline then Sweets then Cam slowly retreated from the room. Angela felt her husband's hand squeeze her arm as he made his way back to his Ookie room. She shut down her computer screen, the images dissolving into the transparent screen that revealed the brick wall behind it.

She glanced over toward Booth and Brennan who had not moved. Both stood facing the screen, seeing, but not seeing the image of Pelant appearing then disappearing to only appear again as if mocking them.

She had wanted to say something, to offer up some kind of comfort, but something in the silence and in their postures made her realize words were not enough, so she turned, too, to make her own retreat from the room.

But something called her back and she turned to look at the partners. Booth's hand had bridged the distance between them and as he clasped Brennan's hand in his and in that single image, Angela found a small shred of hope for them all.

oOo

**A/N:** Thank you for hanging in with me on this. My computer died and I only just got it back recently.

Thank you for reading, writing comments and putting this story down as a favorite or setting the alert so that you could be one of the first to read the latest chapter. Readers, even the silent ones, make writing these worthwhile.

I started this because I was a bit put off by people trashing Brennan for running and always had the last image in my head for the final chapter.


	20. A new phase

The fight which had really been building for a while, finally erupted in one giant explosion that sent both of them skittering to separate corners of their large, but not-quite-large-enough house lest one or the other of them said that one more thing that might completely fracture their partnership.

He'd found himself in the basement, staring at the items he'd cobbled together in a sketchy semblance of what he had envisioned his man cave to be. Staring had quickly turned to action. Still feeling the fiery adrenaline brought on by the fight, he started scraping the cast-iron base of his stadium seats against the floor in a loud protest of what most certainly was her genius-level pigheadedness. He banged around his room, noisily moving other items around, the movements meant to be angry comebacks to her earlier arguments, the sounds meant to remind her that he was an equal partner in their relationship and deserved just as much right to be heard.

She'd disappeared in her office careful not to slam the door for fear the noise would wake Christine and create another loud explosion to follow the first. Here she fumed and fussed, hugging herself as she paced the small room, angry and agitated still from the fight. She managed to replay the highlights of the verbal blows, the tone and word choices pitch perfect, but rather than re-ignite the flames of anger, the exercise seemed only to cause her to realize just how irrational the entire thing had been.

The whole explosion had been born out of frustration and fear, and even though she was not usually expert in recognizing such emotions in others, almost two years of living with Booth, and loving him as well as years of partnership with him had greatly opened her mind to recognizing emotions.

She knew exactly who was responsible for this new hormonal soup; of that she was sure.

When the baby began crying, amplified by the baby monitor she carried now out of habit, she was the first to Christine. Booth trailed her by several seconds, but he hung around, framed by the doorway, dedicated to his daughter even if he was hesitant to enter her nursery if only out of concern that his presence might start a new explosion to rival the first one that morning.

She realized his reluctance to enter the room was more than an unwillingness to take on the diaper duties; Booth had changed hundreds of diapers by now and was a devoted father in all things Christine. She realized why he was standing outside the room, leaning heavily against the door frame and decided to open the peace talks with a simple, "I'm sorry, Booth."

When he took a step closer, whatever barriers had been forged in their fight came crashing down, and she struggled to find the right words to solidify the apology.

"So you admit that you were wrong?"

She'd been fooled by his demeanor; usually it was Booth who reached an epiphany before she did. Somehow it was she who understood that the strain they were both under had been partly to blame for the earlier altercation, so she couldn't react fast enough to his question.

"A genius IQ doesn't always make you right."

And that, she realized, was the crux of the issue.

"Booth, I'm sorry for the fight. It was irrational."

It was the wrong thing to say, although she wondered if there was anything to say. He brought his fist against the wall and the resulting thud drew both her attention as well as the baby's.

"You know, Bones, sometimes you can be so. . . ."

She was grateful he didn't finish his sentence although the way he turned and left made her wonder if there was anything she could do to ameliorate the situation.

Instead, she turned her attention to the baby on the changing table. Christine's face was screwed up in a scowl that usually indicated her own dissatisfaction with the conditions of her stomach or her diaper. Sighing, she pulled the baby into her arms and gently rocked her as she made her way to the couch. Within seconds, the baby was calmer and she was considering her next course of action, but beyond venturing into Booth's man cave and trying to reason him out of his anger, she wasn't sure what she could do.

oOo

He realized halfway to the basement that he was an idiot.

Bones had tried to make peace and he had tried to make war and the truth was he was the idiot.

Detouring from the basement, he stopped at the refrigerator and stood there for far too long contemplating the stainless steel door.

He was an idiot.

In fact, they all were.

He knew exactly who was playing them for fools.

He'd earned desk duty and shrink time for attacking the bastard—neither punishment helping the situation. Bones had spent 3 months on the run, working menial jobs just to get by and they'd both struggled back from her absence to rebuild the life they had wanted.

They were idiots because the man was playing them. And playing them against the other.

Weeks exploring his rage-fueled response to his taunts had allowed him to learn exactly nothing useful. He knew why he had done it; he knew just how close to out of control he had been. Three months without his family had only solidified his resolve not to lose sight of what was important.

But he wasn't any closer to defeating the bastard.

"Booth?"

"What?"

He immediately regretted the tone of his response as he saw the look on her face. She refused his bait and turned when he decided to offer his own olive branch.

"Bones?"

"What?"

She turned, ready for battle, the truce she had tried to broker upstairs all but forgotten.

They stood that way for several seconds, neither sure of what words to use to bring about a real ceasefire; neither sure of the other anymore.

oOo

When he finally made his way upstairs, the house was dark except for the light at the top of the stairs. He hadn't kept tabs on Bones that evening, leaving the upper floors of the house to her and the baby while trying to think through their present predicament in his own kind of purgatory below.

He was hitting the same kind of dead ends as before.

Worst than that, Bones was in the baby's room, curled up on the couch rather than their bed. Christine, too, was curled up in her own kind of dreams, her fists opening and closing in an odd kind of finger symphony.

He tiptoed toward the crib and bent to kiss his daughter, smoothing a stray wisp of hair from her face. "Sweet dreams, kiddo," he whispered.

The baby slept despite the turmoil around her. Bones was especially good at calming the choppy waters around Christine and he was grateful. Christine was the easy part of their equation. No matter what, they could parent her even if they couldn't quite govern themselves. "Sometimes, mommy and daddy act no better than you do when you need your diaper changed," he whispered. "We don't mean to, but. . . ."

He didn't finish because he really couldn't. What was it about psychopaths that turned normally sane people insane?

The next part was hard. Insanity was a difficult thing to defend and when he turned, he had almost been hoping that Bones was asleep and he could table this discussion for the morning.

But she was honest—_sometimes too damned honest_—and she wasn't about to feign sleep simply to ease his feelings.

He sighed and tried to order the mishmash of thoughts ricocheting in his brain. "Look, Bones, I was. . . wrong."

Hours of reflection and that was the best he could come up with?

But she wasn't a vengeful woman, just stubborn to a fault.

"So was I."

This was one of those times when she seemed to be taking her lead from him and one of those times when he needed to take a lead from her. He'd botched up her apology downstairs and he didn't want them to be separated when they needed to be united on this.

"Then come to bed."

He held out his hand.

"There's only one person we need to fight, Booth."

He nodded. She had figured it all out long before he had.

"Then we're going to need some sleep, Bones."

oOo

He was back.

He announced his return with a showy kill by the Washington Monument, a trust-fund baby who left behind a wife and two children and a wake of faulty loans and questionable practices that had earned little more than a glance from the federal regulators.

Then there was the second kill, closer to home. A computer specialist from the Cantilever group had been found dead in her office, the computer system she'd been using to track attacks on the foundation's accounts, a smoldering piece of electronic shrapnel next to her charred body.

And then there was the third victim. She was little more than bits of flesh and bone on Cam's autopsy table in the lab, but whoever she was, she was their best hope at finding and stopping him.

Somehow they'd become so tortured by him, that to speak his name only added to their misery.

But he was back.

Christopher Pelant was back.

oOo

**A/N: I left the story open thinking I might have a bit more story to tell. Guess what? Like a bad penny, I'm back, at least for a while. **


	21. Three months ago

**Paper Locks**

_Author's note: I had great plans for this story and then, I didn't. I had originally just thought of leaving the story as is with Brennan going home and leaving Pelant out there somewhere to torture the squints and their FBI guys and gals, but I then got this big brainstorm that fizzled out. _

_Then came the finale. _

_Like last season's finale, I became annoyed by some of the reactions and will now throw my two cents into the fray. Somehow the reaction again got my creative juices running and I decided I would try to finish this story using season 8's encounters with Pelant and my take on what could happen. _

_I don't own Bones, just the 206 of my own. I'm somewhat attached to them. _

oOo

_THREE MONTHS EARLIER. . . ._

He caught her in a lie.

Temperance Brennan did not as a rule lie. Oh, she would obsfucate (a word he'd picked up living with her) to make him feel better about himself or outright lie if it served her general purpose of trying to get him to eat better. Certainly there were times when she pushed aside further inquiries with a lie —like when she'd come home from the hospital after being shot at the lab and hadn't wanted to take the pain pills because they left her in a fog which made it hard for her to spend time with Christine and him.

But as a rule she did not lie.

She much preferred honesty in all her daily interactions, but she had learned how to lie under his tutelage. In the interrogation room, interviewing suspects, witnesses, a lie sprinkled in here and there often produced the truth. Even with their friends, the lie had become a means to an end. The well-placed lie—or the omission of the truth— sometimes was just kinder than the truth.

And that's what this was.

A sigh. That forthright look—he'd been the one to look away—and her voice shifted again past the hurt to her squinty voice and he knew she was lying to spare his feelings before she retreated to their bedroom upstairs.

"Bones? Are we okay?" he had asked.

She had righted herself, but the lie was clear.

"Of course."

oOo

His pain had only a half-life in contrast to his anger.

For most of his adult life he had tried to control the anger that burbled to the surface, calling to mind his father's rages that sent him skittering to the floor only to try to rise up again to defend his brother or mother against the man's drunken savagery. But when he found himself in the garage pounding the body bag with a ferocity he had so often suppressed, whatever control he had shown in the past was gone.

He'd come to destroy Pelant.

The body bag itself was a poor substitute for the man as were any labels or combination of labels he could give him: Psychopath. Killer. Devil. Manipulator. Bastard.

Maybe Bones knew some ancient curse he could hurl at Pelant, some truly horrific words to describe him, but she was upstairs asleep in their bed, and this was his own attempt to find some small measure of balance in his world. He'd taped his hands carefully and strapped on the gloves and pounded the bag with a savage proficiency meant to banish the demons from within.

Then he slowed, the rage-fueled flurry of fists falling into a rhythm of control and precision, each collision of glove with the bag producing a satisfying smacking sound.

Control.

He hadn't slept well, the night giving him no relief from what he had had to do or the pain he had caused both himself and Bones.

She'd reverted to her earlier argument about marriage to save face, the old argument born of her own fears and insecurities. She'd opened her heart completely to him finally and he had turned around and shut the door. And as much as she might say they were okay, he didn't quite trust her words.

And he couldn't be sure they would ever have the opportunity to open the door to marriage again.

He slammed his fist into the bag and felt the ripple of contact echo through his muscles. Again and again, each blow helped to lessen the anger, helped to give him back the control he needed. One-two, one-two-three. He counted out the combinations, dancing around the bag, his movements settling into a rhythm of sorts. Breathing steady and sure, he punished the bag, a poor substitute for the man he truly wanted to hurt. But the workout was helping to clear away the fog of emotions to help him think over his next steps.

Alan Friedlander had once told him that if you knew where the suspect was going, you got ahead of him. If you didn't, you followed as closely as you could.

He had no damn idea where Pelant was or where he was headed. All he knew was that he would have to play this game for now, but eventually he would have to change the rules.

And he would have to find Pelant in order to kill him.

oOo

"Love is an idiot," she thought to herself as she bent over her sleeping daughter. "No," she corrected aloud, "I am an idiot."

Rational thought had warred with emotions last night and under the fog of sleeplessness, she could make no proper assessment of the evidence, but the emotional truth seemed to be winning out.

Christine, the product of grief-fueled love, would never know just how badly her mother had miscalculated the relationship with Booth.

The yellow walls gave the room a sunny feel, but Brennan's disposition was anything but sunny. If there were such a thing, she felt emotionally hung over. Reaching down into the crib, she brushed back a small lock of hair from her daughter's forehead. The baby, immune to the turmoil within her mother, slept on.

She'd given up on sleep earlier that morning, revisiting the events that had led up to the proposal, revisiting her earlier arguments against marriage. Against long-term relationships. And revisiting all the evidence that marriage was exactly what Booth wanted and what she had grown to want.

And she had periodically listened to Booth's breathing that night to reveal that he, too, had not been sleeping.

Christine stirred and Brennan patted her daughter's back, comforting her daughter in a way that she herself could not be comforted.

Nothing seemed to make sense; she had ample evidence, but there were still pieces missing.

Had she changed herself for the boy as her mother had accused her of doing years ago? Had she misread what Booth wanted? Was she really the person Booth wanted? Were they just together because they had made a baby together and were now responsible for her well-being?

Nothing made sense, yet it all could make sense and unable to ask Booth anything, the evidence might remain incomplete.

Sighing, she smoothed away a wrinkle of sleep from Christine's brow and tried to order her own weary thoughts. But nothing made sense and yet, it all made sense, from a certain point of view.

Still troubled by the raging thoughts that refused to be tamed, she schooled her features and tried to don the most neutral of expressions. Christine needed her to maintain a working and personal relationship with Booth; Booth needed her to be fine with the new line he had drawn for them.

And even if she wasn't, she needed the world to see that she was fine.

oOo

"Have you and Dr. Brennan set the date, yet, Agent Booth?"

Sweets' inquiry and any like it had been far from his mind, the snippets of conversation between himself and Brennan that morning consuming his thoughts.

"No need to," he said, donning a smile and pressing the lever of the spigot forward for coffee. "We decided last night that we don't need to get married."

Had he had more time, he might have phrased his reply better.

"You mean Dr. Brennan took back her proposal?"

Turning, he eyed the younger man and smiled. "I told Bones that we didn't need to get married. What we have is enough. We don't need a piece of paper."

He'd seen the young man sometimes stunned speechless by himself or Bones, especially when they'd been his patients. Then it had been a game to see just how little they could reveal, just how much they could turn his observations about them back onto him.

But now, Sweets' silence gave way to a quizzical look. "Are you channeling Dr. Brennan after all this time together?"

"Like some Psychic Network hotline?" Booth joked as he wiggled the fingers of his free hand trying to make light of the whole sit. "Look, we're fine how we are and we don't need to complicate things with a wedding and all that goes into that. We're fine. We don't need to get married."

"Because she proposed with jerky?" Sweets actually squinted at him. "I still don't know what that means."

Booth pointed at Sweets with his coffee mug. "She was willing to give me what I want like the jerky because it makes me happy," he said slowly, willing the man to believe him. "But like the jerky, it might make me happy, but I don't need it to sustain me, like marriage. What we have is enough."

He smiled and cuffed Sweets' shoulder. "This is a good thing, Sweets."

The psychologist shrugged and put his own coffee mug under the spigot. "I just find it interesting that you were the happiest I'd ever seen you the other day when you told me that Dr. Brennan proposed and now," he said, "and now it's. . . I don't know that I want to say this."

Booth sipped at his coffee and then plastered on a broad grin. "Go ahead, Sweets."

"All that talk of marriage? Was that a way to test Dr. Brennan?"

Booth hid his reaction behind the smile and just leaned into Sweets. "Bones and I don't play games with each other. You know how she is, what you see is what you get. She wouldn't put up with anything like that."

"Yeah, sure," Sweets sputtered, unconvinced. "but there seems to be something off about this."

"Nothing's off," Booth said, shaking his head. "We're going to go on just as we are. Living together, raising our daughter together. Everything's fine."

"If you say so," Sweets said, shrugging. "If you say so."

oOo

"Have you and Booth settled on a date?"

Words shouldn't have that much power, but they did and Brennan deliberately turned from Angela as she delivered the news that they weren't getting married.

Thankfully there were no additional words from her friend, not at first.

When the silence grew too long, she glanced over at Angela. What could only be described as surprise registered on Angela's features.

"You two getting married is exactly what Booth wanted," Angela finally sputtered. "There's something wrong, Sweetie."

Of that, Brennan could not disagree. Something profound had occurred from the time she proposed to the time Booth had suggested that they should not get married. Here at the lab, away from their home, she had been able to slip into scientific mode and began to examine the evidence with more objectivity that she had before. She'd been over everything that she was aware of from one time to the next, rational thought finally trumping the emotional turmoil, but nothing truly made sense. She had a paucity of information and what data she did have made little sense in light of everything she knew. Booth had seemed entirely happy with the proposal and completely saddened by the recusal.

Nothing was as it should be.

"Booth said that we didn't need to get married," Brennan said. "He apparently has come to accept my arguments against marriage."

But Angela could not be, would not be appeased by a straight-forward recital of the facts.

"That man loves you and all he's ever really wanted was to be with you," Angela argued. "He's a traditional kind of guy who believes in marriage."

Brennan, her head bowed toward the skeletal remains she was examining, looked up and straightened. "He finds that living together is satisfactory."

Their morning conversation was forced—even she could sense that—and Booth had seemed to struggle with the little things that he normally handled with grace and confidence.

She was fine, they were fine, everything was fine, but nothing was. Not really.

And while she rarely relied solely on her instinct—her gut—to make a decision, this time she would not deny it.

"Something is wrong."

oOo

He'd hidden away in his office rather than call Bones to meet him at the diner or the Founding Fathers for lunch, but it wasn't exactly work calling to him. Instead he stared at the photo of Brennan and Christine for several moments before pouring over the lists on his desk.

The questions were simple: how do you find a ghost who can manipulate computers to hide his trail? How do you protect yourself and your family while hunting him down?

He needed resources outside the normal FBI channels, but he wasn't going to kill Pelant outside of the law. He'd walked to one of the last remaining pay phones in D.C. to make the first of the calls needed to get ahead of this thing.

But he couldn't keep his eyes from the photo of a smiling Brennan and Christine. He had never expected Bones to propose, but when she had, he'd practically been flying from pure joy. Then fate had snatched back the prize and replaced it with doubt and hurt and lies.

And he hated it.

After his morning workout, he'd passed Bones and Christine in the kitchen, the baby babbling away happily between mouthfuls of cereal and milk, his partner's full concentration on their child. Brennan had only glanced at him, her eyes revealing a long night of wakefulness that he felt responsible for.

No. It was Pelant. It was all on Pelant.

He had once hoped the shot he'd fired into Pelant's car had left him to bleed to a slow, slow death, but fate had only been toying with him. _Them_. Hodgins had lost his gazillions to what had to be one of the biggest cyber heists of all time and he had drawn a target on his own back with the kill shot that hadn't.

Months ago he and Brennan had gotten past the all-too-polite back and forth that had gotten much too polite until it wasn't and he had secretly hoped that Pelant would piss off someone in Egypt who wouldn't think twice about ending the madman's life.

But Pelant had taken the fight to the FBI by manipulating that girl into killing two agents and he'd requested a task force under his command to gear up to take the man down.

He turned from the picture of a smiling Brennan and Christine and decided if he was going to break protocol this was the time, these were the people to do it for. There would be two tasks forces after Pelant. One official. One not even close to being official anything.

oOo

She remembered everything well. Stay away from tourist areas, public places, big shopping areas. Keep out of the crime-ridden areas as well. Surveillance cameras meant to protect and to serve only served one master these days: Christopher Pelant. Facial recognition software could be had easily enough and that one tool of law enforcement could readily be used to track her movements.

Be invisible. Blend in. Avoid conversations.

She'd taken the added precaution of taking the bus, a crowded vehicle where any number of bodies would obscure hers.

Blend in.

When the woman next to her started in on her daughter's upcoming wedding, Brennan had buried her own hurt and feigned disinterest, then went back to the magazine she'd carried onto the bus.

Avoid conversations.

Max had been implicit in his instructions while she had been on the run with Christine, and now she was on a different kind of run. The life she was saving was the life she wanted.

She was pretty damned sure she had it figured out.

It was part rational thought, part gut, yet she couldn't disprove it, not with the evidence she had before her. But she had trusted Angela, trusted Booth—up until last night—and somehow the conclusion she had drawn felt right.

As did her ultimate conclusion—Christopher Pelant had to die.

oOo

It had been a while since he'd been here in the afternoon like this. Within the building hid a variety of sins that came to light in the darkest of its recesses.

And he was about to add one more sin.

He felt the heavy wooden door close behind him, closing off the afternoon light and leaving him in the cool shadows of the place. In front of him, near the altar, the arms of Saint Joseph were held wide to welcome all.

Even him.

He made his way to the side of the church and slid into one of the pews near the confessionals. Kneeling, he made the sign of the cross and bent his head in prayer.

God knew his heart and no prayer came, just three little words: Forgive me, Lord.

He crossed himself again and slid back into the seat and watched as people came and went, disappearing into the confessional before re-emerging and finding their way to one of the pews around him before making their way back to the outside world.

He sat there a long time and waved off an elderly woman who pointed toward the confessional as if to give up her place in line. She slowly shuffled into the box, head bowed and solemn before emerging a short time later.

He waited out them all until he was the last then slid over to the confessional and opened the door.

There was something unsettling about closing off the bits of light from the church and being left in total darkness. He sensed the priest on the other side of the screen and knew the few moments between him kneeling and the opening of the screen were meant for the confessor to order his thoughts.

But he had already chosen this path.

Although he was expecting it, the sliding of the screen startled him and he waited for the priest to invite him to speak in the whispery voice of the confessional. "You may begin."

"Bless me, father," Booth intoned. "But I'm not here to confess my sins which are many. I need a different kind of help."

oOo

She'd followed his instructions to the letter, paying for everything with cash and finding her way to the small deserted neighborhood park. Wait 15 minutes, he had instructed. If he didn't appear during that time, she was to meet him a few blocks to the east.

Fear had fueled her flight before and that same fear now commanded her actions. She had only to look at the flayed bodies left behind by Pelant to know that the game had to have a different set of rules.

So she waited, glancing at her watch only as she turned the pages of the magazine she had brought. Here she could find out the latest about Britney Spears and Taylor Swift and she secretly wondered why anyone would really care about one or the other.

Then she saw him.

His gait still showed signs of the damage he'd done to his hip and leg almost two years ago. He smiled as he neared and she suddenly felt a different kind of fear.

She stood, leaving the magazine to the breeze which teased the pages open where she had left it on the seat.

"What, ho, wait, honey," he said, "I thought this is what you wanted. I thought you said that you think Pelant is behind this."

"I don't know, Dad," she countered. "There's a preponderance of evidence that suggests. . . ."

She talked to quell the fear, to hide her discomfort at what they were about to do, but her father, ever-patient with his headstrong daughter, waited her out as the arguments slowly petered out.

"You need my help, honey," he finally interjected. "This bastard is never going to let up. You know what his endgame is." Max paused. "He wants you or Booth or both of you dead."

It was the one piece of conjecture she had no incontrovertible proof of, yet she knew it to be true.

"So what do we do, Dad?" she finally asked although she knew the answer.

"We hunt down the bastard."

oOo

He found her in her office, a dozen books open and strewn about the coffee table, while she seemed to be pouring over the contents of her computer which was balanced on her lap.

He recognized the look—one of complete concentration, when little of the outside world could penetrate.

"Hey, remember us?"

Christine got a smile, but when her eyes met his the smile softened and then disappeared.

He dropped his own gaze toward Christine, the change in Brennan's face a little too hard to take. Their daughter was babbling into the ear of a small white rabbit which she then held out to her mother.

"I'll just be a minute," Brennan said stiffly.

He watched as Brennan closed each book and piled them on the table, then took the long way around the table as if to avoid him.

He sighed.

"We can stop at Whey Chai's on the way home," he offered. "Unless you want something. . . ."

"No, that's fine," she said, cutting him off. She grabbed her bag and looked at him. He couldn't read her expression.

"Yeah, home we go." He grabbed at the stroller and begen making vroom-vroom noises for Christine and only felt Brennan walking out with him. He didn't dare glance at her.

oOo

The smell of the food definitely warmed up the car and when he threw a smile at her she only shrugged.

"Smells good, right?"

She glanced back at Christine. "She might like the story about the anthropomorphic mouse and his peers."

Booth sighed. He was doing a great deal of sighing since he arrived at the Jeffersonian.

"Maybe," he started, "maybe we should get away this weekend. Let you dad take Christine and we can. . . ."

She finished his sentence with an Anglo-Saxon expression for intercourse and she watched him visibly wince.

She'd done it on purpose, testing him, wanting to know how he'd react. It gave her no satisfaction to hurt him, but she had to know.

"No, not. . . ," he sputtered. "Not just. . . . Do you have to say it that way?"

"It's one of more than 300 descriptions for the act of intercourse," she supplied. "Would you like me to describe it as the beast with two backs?"

He was flustered, that was evident.

"We could _make love_," he said, emphasizing the last two words. "You know that's what we do."

"We could stay at home to have sex."

She watched his walls rise as he sighed and sat back in his seat visibly annoyed with her. He glanced her way and she deliberately looked down at the cartons of food in her lap.

And she heard him sigh.

oOo

Three months ago is when it began—the season of lies and secrets.


	22. Nine weeks ago

**Paper Locks**

**A/N: **_Is she really going to continue this? Is she going to stick with this?_

_Writing is sometimes an act of sanity for me and given the huge life change going on right now in my life, I think it's pretty safe to say that I need this story just as B&B need to end Pelant's reign of horror somehow._

_oOo_

_NINE WEEKS AGO._

He waited impatiently at the small diner, his foot beating a rhythm into the floor, his right hand palming a lighter.

It had been a long three weeks. More than once he had wanted to tell Bones the truth, tell her about the blackmail, tell her he hadn't meant what he said, but he remained silent sure that she would forgive him once this was over.

And losing her or Christine to Pelant was too great a risk.

Angela had helped by finding that app for him and he carried a WiFi hotspot detector as a precaution. And he'd swept the house again for anything that could be used against them by Pelant. Frankly, if two soup cans and a string would protect them from the bastard, then he would have used them instead of a damned cell phone that seemed only to be a beacon for the psychopath.

Under the radar were his watchwords these days.

The people who populated this greasy spoon seemed self-contained, self-absorbed really and no one gave him a second glance. It, too, was under the radar.

He brought the coffee cup to his lips and sipped at the liquid. Strong. Black. A good cup of Joe. A carousel on the counter next to the register offered up a sorry slice of pie and a piece of cake that seemed to have seen better days.

"Seeley?"

Booth turned his head and nodded as the older man slid into the booth across from him. Without his collar, Father Jon could have been any of the other patrons of the diner.

"We could have met at the parish," Booth said. "It might have been _better_."

He meant _safer_, but Father Jon wasn't one to run from a fight.

"I'll trust in the Lord," Father Jon corrected. "Besides, we're just a couple of old friends sitting and having coffee. Talking over matters of the heart and soul."

Booth held his gaze and stilled his foot before glancing toward the window and noticing a homeless man, a sign taped to his front announcing his status, shuffling past the diner.

Father Jon followed his eyes. "What we do for the least of our brethren," he said, "we do for Him."

"Matthew," Booth said. "Matthew 25:40."

Father Jon smiled. "You know your Bible, Seeley. You also know that the Church frowns on your current living situation."

Booth never let his gaze waver. "It's not going to change," he said. "Not until this is settled."

Father Jon shrugged. "You're a good man, Seeley. And I'm sure Temperance is a good woman. But for your spiritual health. . . ."

"I _have told you_ she's an atheist."

Father Jon only smiled. "God holds a special place for the non-believers." He acknowledged the waitress who poured him a cup of coffee. He reached for the sugar. "But she does God's work identifying the dead and giving their family's peace."

"She wouldn't see it as God's work."

"No," said Father Jon as he sipped his coffee. "But God sees all just the same."

Booth set his lighter down and leaned in. "How much does God really see?"

Father Jon lifted his cup to his lips. "You would be surprised."

oOo

Weeks of Sweets living under her roof had given her access to the stray psychology books he would leave laying around the house and Temperance Brennan, avid reader, didn't let a mere soft science stop her curiosity.

At first it was the insatiable reader that had been attracted to the book left in her bathroom. Then it had become a way to glimpse into Sweets' malaise following his breakup with Daisy. Later she began to see the connections between the psychological insights and her own experiences working murder cases with Booth.

And now those weeks of sharing Sweets' reading material was paying off in her understanding of Pelant.

Her philosophy had always been to understand everything about a case—everything about the skeleton, the context in which it was found, the manner in which it was found, its condition—everything. And now her research subject was slowly revealing himself to her: Christopher Pelant.

She now understood the psychological need to turn away from one's childhood haunts and seek out a different persona, even if it was one that had been invented and Photoshopped. She now understood how someone might want to create a better life by generating a totally new one, even a digital one.

And yet, she didn't.

She usually found no useful purpose in comparing her life to another, but she saw parallels between Christopher Pelant's teen years and her own.

And yet, she didn't.

The concepts she'd read about in Sweets' books had given her insights into the criminal mind, particularly Pelant's mind, something she needed if she were going to defeat the murderer and thief. Despite just how badly her attempt to decipher Pelant's mind had turned out for Ethan Sawyer, an old friend who possibly had a key to unlocking the psychopath's next move, she'd revisited Sawyer's triangle of symbols and even had Angela manipulate the image to see if there were any other meanings behind the message. She needed to understand and she needed to keep any and all of her other friends safe.

And it gave her little time for Booth.

Truth was that Booth, too, seemed to be avoiding her, finding his way home later and later each night until some nights she would fall asleep in bed before he came in. Conversations were already stilted between them and sometimes avoidance was preferable to spending any time in the same room together trying to piece together something to say.

Tonight she had bathed Christine and sung her to sleep, singing one of the silly songs in the book Max had brought for her, then retreated to the bedroom where she immersed herself in an abnormal psychology text she'd borrowed from Sweets.

Before she had often given Sweets' profiles a perfunctory glance, but she had gone back through the information he had provided about Pelant and tried to make sense of insights that seemed contradictory.

She had even gone so far as to color-code the Post-It notes and written down several questions to pose to the young psychologist tomorrow at his office.

She was deep into looking at the comparative brain structures of a so-called normal brain versus an abnormal brain when Booth appeared at their bedroom door. He looked weary and wary and she felt a wave of guilt warring with her own feelings.

"Is the task force getting any closer?" she asked. It was one of the safer zones right now in their relationship.

He groaned in answer and plopped down on the bed. "We're chasing shadows," he said.

"He's a highly organized psychopath with. . . ," she began.

"What the hell have you been reading?" Booth asked as he sat up suddenly and grabbed at her book.

"He's very good at manipulating people, particularly people thought to be highly suggestible personality types better designated as. . . ."

"No."

She had much more to say, much more insight into Pelant and the young woman he had manipulated into helping him kill two FBI agents. She really had compiled a profile that really rivaled the report she had just read that afternoon written by Sweets. And she had also read the profiles on all of the members of the their team for good measure—if Pelant was profiling them, then she should understand just how he saw them through Sweets' psychological filters.

"I think I understand that Pelant's need to feel superior to the FBI and our team stems from. . . ." This time he did not stop her as she pointed out Pelant's seeming obsession with the FBI or the government and how using the young woman as his gunwoman might very well be related to ". . . an injury he sustained when you shot at him when he was fleeing Serberus. It's quite possible that the injury was more cosmetic in nature, something that would have prevented him from leaving his current domicile. I actually asked Angela to help me come up with a number of scenarios. . . ."

She trailed off her subject uncertain how to proceed in light of the grin the Booth now sported.

"What?" she demanded.

He shook his head. "You're absolutely brilliant."

"I know."

"It's not really a contest, Bones."

And there was that grin. The lines of his mouth curled only slightly upward, but she recognized it despite it being strangely absent in their lives of late.

If she were being completely honest with herself, she missed this Booth, she missed this kind of moment when hurt and anger and sadness and mystery no longer ruled their relationship and they were simply Bones and Booth.

"Why don't you get ready for bed and I'll give you a massage?"

If his grin had been a key in the door, her invitation had opened it and he leaned in and kissed her cheek and lingered there.

Something about his touch electrified her and she leaned back, lengthening the contact. When he pulled away, all she heard was a whispered, "I'm so sorry, Bones."

oOo

Most mornings of late it was far too easy to get out of bed and don his workout gloves and pound the heavy bag or put on his Nikes for a run around the neighborhood. This morning the bed retained a pull that had long been missing so it was with some reluctance that he arose and left behind a sleeping Brennan.

Last night she had initiated first contact, lending her talented fingers to his aching flesh and then going deeper, igniting a primal fire in them both that had been left dormant far too long.

He padded off to the nursery and checked on Christine who had curled around her Philly's Fanatic, holding onto it for dear life. Bending down, he kissed her forehead before straightening and stroking her silky hair.

She had the potential to be the best of both of them, and easily the sacrifice of a postponed wedding seemed small compared to her. Christine opened her eyes briefly and uncoiled her right arm before tightening her grip on the Fanatic.

Behind him, Brennan approached and she threaded her arm around his and leaned into him. "She should sleep for another hour, Booth."

He reveled in the touch, in her nearness. Somehow he didn't feel as if he deserved this and sent a silent thank-you to the heavens for this small miracle.

"You want breakfast?" Booth offered. "I can make those pancakes you like so much."

He could sense the hesitation, the reluctance to give in, but unlike the days before, today she accepted.

He threaded his fingers in hers and squeezed her hand gently. "You and Christine are the most important people in my life, Bones. Right here and now."

He turned his head and willed her to look at him. It took several silent missives, but she twisted to face him and he sent up another prayer of thanks. "I can't imagine," he said, "living my life with anyone else but you."

oOo

But he had lied to her.

As she watched him turning over one of blueberry pancakes, she still felt the faint bruising of the marriage rejection.

By nature, she cataloged evidence and the facts were these: Booth had lied about the reasons for not getting married. He had always wanted more and had made no secret of his desire, often teasing her about it, but something had caused him to lie.

Booth had only lied to her in the past to either be kind or to protect her.

"Blueberry pancakes," Booth announced, his grin widening as Christine reached out for him. He slid the stack of pancakes away from the baby and toward her. "We have baby-sized pancakes, but they'll have to cool first."

When he told her that he couldn't imagine living his life without her, she had sensed no lie and her reaction—the sharp pricking of tears—had made her revisit the initial lie.

It colored so much of their lives these days.

She evaluated almost everything he told her now, tested it against what she knew and the context and what she suspected had been behind the initial lie. While her mind worked quickly at these puzzles, she had grown tired of the tension between them, the tension often exasperated by that one clear lie.

And hers. The one that she was fine with the end of the engagement and the beginning of this new phase that seemed fraught with shadows and secrets.

"You know Christine needs to cool those off, but you can eat them now, Bones," Booth said, his expression registering confusion. "I thought you wanted these."

Glancing at the mall stack on her plate, she began spooning the heated blueberry sauce on top of the stack he had set in front of her. While it had an inordinate amount of sugar and carbohydrates, she did like the taste of the pancakes smothered in sauce.

And it made Booth happy that she seemed to like them.

Christine, too, was ready for the smaller version pancakes and Brennan pulled one from the stack and quartered it. Christine fisted the portion and began to stuff it into her mouth.

With turner in hand, Booth stopped to watch Christine who was burbling with her happy talk. "She likes 'em, Bones. Are yours okay?"

Nodding that they were, it was easy to forget the last three months. Christine was doing her own kind of humming as she fed herself the smaller bits of pancake and apple slices. Booth, too, was humming, his entire demeanor much lighter than it had been. Last night they had made love, not merely had sex. There were subtleties, but she understood them well after two years of loving Booth.

And there were subtleties here, too, she thought as she ate her pancakes. Booth seemed to have shed the tension in his shoulders and seemed genuinely at ease with her this morning. Sex certainly had that effect on him, but it seemed to go deeper somehow. His smiles, too, were real, not the half smiles she'd grown used to, the ones in which he seemed to be smiling, but his eyes revealed a different message.

It would be oh, so easy to simply allow the morning to continue as it was—Christine literally tearing into her pancakes and chattering her pleasure as she did so, Booth talking back to their daughter with his own brand of baby talk and grinning wholeheartedly in her direction, her own sense of peace and harmony as she sat watching two of the most important people in her life enjoying themselves.

But she had to ask.

"Is the task force any closer?"

Immediately she saw the shift in his eyes and in his body language. Sweets might read the mind, but she read the body, especially Booth's.

"It's fine," he said, as he sat down next to her at the table. "How 'bout more of that secret sauce?"

He twisted up from his seat and headed back to the stove to retrieve the sauce pan.

"Have they located Pelant?"

"You know, Bones," Booth said, his voice taking on a light tone, entirely in contrast with the Pittsburgh steel of his eyes, "we can talk about other things at breakfast besides work." He addressed Christine. "We could talk about what Christine would like to do this weekend, right, baby girl?"

But Brennan asked the question because she needed to know. "I'd like to know what kind of progress. . . ."

"It's all being taken care of, Bones." He slid back into his seat and set the sauce pan down on the trivet. "The FBI's working on it."

"I'd like to help, Booth."

"You are," he said as he bent toward his own food.

"But how?"

She watched as he chewed his food, his right hand shooting out for the glass of milk in front of his plate that he held poised as if to wash down the pancakes and buy him a bit more time for a response.

She was oh, so used to this dance.

"I'd like to know how I'm helping by doing nothing, Booth." She continued to protest to a retreating Booth. Retreating despite sitting next to her. "I would like to help."

Booth finished chewing and then sipped at his milk. His movements were deliberate and slow. "It's being handled, Bones." His eyes shifted from her to his food and he bent back to his breakfast.

"But. . . ."

"But, what?" Whatever calm he had demonstrated before erupted in controlled agitation. "I tell you that the FBI is handling it and you keep poking."

"Hodgins thinks that. . . ."

"Hodgins should stick to his bugs." Booth was back to the steely voice and look that brooked no argument. "Why do you have to do this? Especially this morning?" He tried to get back to his pancakes, but he only bent to them. "We've got these great pancakes and Christine's singin' and swingin'." He looked up and tried to smile and she recognized the plea on his face, too. Let it go.

Frustrated, she bent to the pancakes and speared a few bites and chewed on them, trying to take in the domestic scene and ignoring the subtext that was evident, even to her.

Booth seemed to curl into himself and to erect barriers at the same time and she considered this as additional evidence of . . . well, that was the thing, wasn't it? Evidence she had; the ability to discover if her theory was right was severely limited by the man next to her.

They ate in silence, but Christine did not. She continued her running commentary on her breakfast, humming and singing and tossing in an occasional giggle. When her plate was emptied of "booberries" she dropped a fist to the table and made her demands plain: "More."

Booth smiled—_a genuine smile_—and took an orphaned pancake and tore it apart for her before setting the pieces in front of Christine. For her part, their daughter looked on, then grabbed at the first piece Booth put in front of her and shoved it without ceremony into her mouth.

"I think these are Christine's favorite," she said, trying to steer away from the silence between them. "They are very good, Booth. Thank you."

Booth's eyes softened and she saw a bit of the unguarded Booth, the one who had made love with her last night, re-emerge.

"I was thinking it might be nice to invite Angela and Hodgins over for dinner soon," she offered.

"We could also invite Cam," Booth added. Then he grinned. "Or you don't really want to invite her here because she'll bring your intern."

It was her turn to be defensive, but this was familiar ground, an easy deflection, a bit of teasing from Booth. Something familiar. Something not fraught with tension or awkwardness.

"Yeah, we could invite them over and have a barbecue," Booth was saying. "I could fire up the grill for some steaks. . . or doesn't your Mr. Viziri eat cow."

This was comfortable: Christine's eyes darting between each of them as Booth spun his vision of a party and the menu and what people would and would not eat.

"Hodgins thinks Pelant should be at the top of the FBI's most wanted list," she offered, a detour from the bantering about the proposed party.

And she saw it. The shift. His body became rigid. The vein in his neck seemed to throb a new rhythm. His hands stilled. His eyes and mouth. . . .

She cataloged these reactions without comment, even as Booth's defensiveness exploded into a rant.

"Spider boy should mind his spidey sense," Booth was muttering. "FBI's got other bugs to squash. What's his problem? Doesn't he think the FBI knows what it's doing?"

"The FBI's forensic accountants have had all the evidence on Pelant's transfer of money from the Cantilever accounts and they still haven't been able to trace how he was able to break into the system."

Although she was merely pointing out the obvious, she knew she had tipped the morning's delicate balance. Booth again gave her a look of pure steel.

And that was all she needed.

"I didn't mean to upset you, Booth." She reached out a hand to touch his. "I trust you."

For some reason, it just seemed like the right thing to say.

But the wild look Booth gave her told her she'd just said the wrong thing again.

oOo

It took several miles before he realized he had the steering wheel in a death grip and had forgotten to breathe. Slowly, ever so slowly, the color returned to his knuckles and he caught a gasp of air in is lungs.

_God,_ he thought, _where was that Ferrari brain going next?_

Brennan was circling the Pelant problem and he wondered how much she suspected. He'd been careful, ever so careful, avoiding the truth about why he'd nixed the marriage proposal and yet, she seemed to have zeroed in on Pelant as the reason.

Or had she?

He hated the situation, hated Pelant, hated himself for not having a better answer. He'd wounded her, that was for sure, and it was so much like that time when she had told him she didn't want regrets and he had told her, no, he was with Hannah and. . . . "God!" He slammed his fist into the steering wheel.

She was far too smart, far too knowledgeable about him and the FBI _not_ to know that something was going on.

And for the briefest moment he prayed that she wouldn't find out just how he was going to fix this.

oOo

She waited outside the restaurant as instructed, her hands deep inside the pockets of her spring jacket. Her right hand worried a loose string as she kept an eye out for her father.

This was not her usual diner, but one several miles away from the Jeffersonian, several minutes beyond the area she usually kept to. Even if she started now, she would return to work well past her hour lunch.

But some things couldn't be helped, her father had told her. Sometimes you have to go outside your comfort zone.

It had been his advice while she had been on the run with Christine and she had tried desperately to follow his instructions to the letter until she had grown so tired and lonely for Booth and her friends that she had taken the chance at the motel.

And now?

She couldn't classify part of her deduction as more than a hunch—something that really made her feel uncomfortable—but she still felt she knew much more than the evidence suggested. And if she was going to take the next step, she needed help.

Help arrived, of course, in a late model car with her father behind the wheel.

He rolled down the window. "Get in, honey."

"I thought we were going to have lunch here, Dad."

Max gave a glance to the diner and shook his head. "I brought you a salad and I've got a sandwich here. I thought we'd go have a picnic somewhere else."

She scrambled to the other side of the car and slid into the front seat next to him. "You didn't steal this car, Dad, did you?"

She'd known how he had managed to keep her and Christine safe while they had been on the run and while she hadn't approved, she had understood the need to remain hidden from Pelant's view.

"You think we would be watched?" she asked as her father pulled out onto the street.

"I just like to play it safe. Cyber boy has too many eyes what with all the electronic gizmos at his command." He signaled for a right turn. "It's better to be safe."

Years of listening to Hodgins' conspiracy theories hadn't really prepared her for her father's own brand of paranoia, but weeks on the run had and she remained silent as he drove them even more miles from the diner to a small park off the road.

She carried the bags with their food to the park bench. The park was little more than a clearing and a weather-worn sign announcing it as Liberty Park. Sitting down, she began to open up the bags as Max slid in opposite her.

"Dad, I don't like keeping secrets from Booth," she said.

"I know, honey." He unwrapped his sandwich and offered her the pickle. "But he's keeping secrets from you right now, probably to protect you and Christine."

Of that, despite the lack of tangible evidence, was something she believed to be true.

Max gave her a good long look over his sandwich. "I don't like this bastard out there. He's probably stalking you and Booth. Every security camera that should protect you from someone like him is just giving him more information about you."

She nodded as she speared a tomato. "I need your help, Dad." The tomato hung in the air between them.

"I think I have a way to find Pelant."


End file.
